How To Clone A Hard Drive

Plenty of great services can back up your files, but sometimes you need something more bulletproof.

- Whitson Gordon

Maybe you’re migrating your Windows installation to a new hard drive, or maybe you want a complete one-to-one copy in case anything goes wrong. Your best bet is to clone your hard drive, creating an exact copy that you can swap in and boot up right away.

Some backup services, including IDrive and Acronis, have disk-cloning features built in, supplementing the normal file backup. We’ll be using some free tools designed specifically for drive cloning in this guide, though. For a true backup solution with supplemental cloning features, check out one of the paid options. But for one-off clones (for example, if you’re migrating your OS to a new drive), these tools will be all you need.

Connect Your Secondary Drive: For this process, you’ll (obviously) need two drives: the source drive, with the data you want to clone, and the destination drive, on which you’re cloning that data. If you have a desktop computer and both drives are installed internally (or you’re just cloning to a USB external drive for backup), great! You’re ready to continue.

But when you’re using a laptop with only one drive bay, you need an external SATA-to-USB adapter, dock, or enclosure to connect your bare drive to the computer. Once you’ve connected, you can go through the cloning process, then disconnect and install the drive internally.

In most cases, your destination drive will have to be as large as or larger than your source drive. If it isn’t, you’ll need to free up space on your source drive and shrink the main partition down to fit.

Windows Users: Macrium Reflect Free: Windows users have lots of great cloning tools available, but we’ll be using Macrium Reflect Free. The software is free, easy to use, and widely loved by many, so it’s hard to go wrong.