How to Clone Hard Drive for Free

best cloning software

Frequently asked question about hard drive clone

This article is a full collection of hard drive cloning. Before getting the answer about how to clone hard drive, there are some questions people often asked.

What is hard drive clone?

Hard drive clone refers to cloning everything on your original hard drive, including all the data like all the applications, files, folders and the partition layout, operating system (if there had any), downloads, programs and settings to your destination storage. On the whole, the target hard drive will be completely the same as the original one.

What are the benefits to clone hard drive

There are several reasons to explain why you need to clone hard drives.

  • Improve performance

Amounts of Cash and loads of files will accumulate on your hard drives gradually, which will definitely affect your computer performance, like slowing down the running speed and even causing hard drive breakdown or operation disasters. However, cloning a hard drive to a larger or better-performance hard drive will provide a better user experience with obviously smoother running operation and upgraded performance speed.

  • Data backup

You can restore your data easily if you perform a disk clone once you delete files or folders carelessly or if your devices are infected with viruses or malware attacks unfortunately.

  • Change or upgrade the hard drive

When you want to change your hard drive, but worry about losing the personal data on it, you just need to clone your hard drive to a new one. What’s more, it’s acceptable for you to upgrade your original small hard drive to a larger, faster and more reliable hard drive if you clone the whole hard drive disk.

  • Save more time and energy

Copy the entire disk instead of just copying some files or folders will definitely save more time.

What should I prepare for hard drive clone?

Perform a hard drive clone is simple, it includes several procedures:

Procedure 1. Connect your target hard drive to your computer, it can be an HDD or SSD, etc. Please make sure it can be detected properly.

Procedure 2. Choose the best cloning software. Unfortunately, there is no built-in cloning utility in Windows. Of course, it’s possible to clone a hard drive manually, but it’s much easier and faster to use cloning software. Also, you can customize your cloning needs with powerful cloning software.

Procedure 3. Execute cloning operations with the best cloning software.

The easiest way to clone hard drive

Luckily, there is plenty of cloning software in the data protection field. You need to choose a well-performance hard drive software. Some factors such as multiple functions, usability, accuracy and cost of such software you should take into consideration. Hence, considering the comprehensibility, one of the best free external hard drive cloning software AOMEI Backupper Standard is recommended to you.

More distinguished features are listed below:

  • It is a powerful cloning software that supports cloning HDD or SDD with Windows 11/10/8/7/XP/Vista.
  • Multiple options: you can clone your disk and partition. Besides, the advanced version also supports system clones.
  • Intelligent clone: it enables you to clone only used sectors from your original to another while skipping bad sectors, thus you can easily clone your hard drive to a smaller SSD, and clone a disk with bad sectors without any obstacles.
  • It is a full-featured backup and restore software. For example, it can execute disk backup easily with just a few clicks.

Cautions

  • You need to back up important data on your target disk before performing a clone because all the info on it will be overwritten by the original one.
  • Check out if there is sufficient space on the target disk to store the original one, which should be larger or equal to the used space on the original one.

How to clone hard drive

Here is the tutorial presented to show you how to clone a hard drive with AOMEI Backupper.

Step 1. Select Clone from the left-hand side menu and then select Disk Clone.

Step 2. Select the Source Disk—-original hard drive that you want to clone. Click Next.

Step 3. Select the Destination Disk to which the source disk will be cloned, and click Next.

Step 4. In the next window, choose Start Clone. Then wait for the prompt, and click Finish afterward.

Hard drive cloning is practical in data backup, hard drive change and upgrades. You can copy everything on your original hard drive to your target one. However, it’s necessary for you to find reliable cloning software. AOMEI Backupper is a case in point. It is free of charge and offers powerful cloning functions.  If you want to clone your hard drive with ease, you can really have a try.