Share on Facebook Tweet this Share is one thing, but if you want to make an exact copy of your hard disk – operating system, software, and all of your files included – then you need to know how to clone a hard drive. Not only is cloning a useful way to back everything up, but it’s also great for getting set up on a new hard drive without re-installing your operating system. No matter if you’re a Windows or Mac user, we’ve put together brief tutorials that’ll help you get through the cloning process. Because it’s by far the most popular and widely-used operating system, we’ll start with Windows. Mac users can scroll down to find the OS X tutorial. Oh, and just to be totally clear on the terminology used in these guides, your “source drive” is the drive you want to make a copy of. Your “destination drive” is the drive you want to copy everything onto.
Windows There are a handful of good cloning programs out there for various flavors of Windows, but our favorite – simply for its extremely straightforward interface – is Macrium Reflect. Here’s how to clone a drive with it: Step 1:. It’s available in free and paid editions, but the free version should satisfy the needs of most users. Step 2: Attach the destination drive to your computer. This disk needs to have more space than the source drive. If it doesn’t, it won’t be able to store the clone. Step 3: Open Macrium Reflect.
Stellar Drive Clone is a Complete Mac Hard Drive Cloning utility that clones and creates a disk image of the Mac hard drive, Solid State Drives, Partitions and External Hard Drives. This Mac cloning tool supports HFS-to-HFS, FAT-to-FAT and NTFS-to-EXFAT cloning.
You’ll see a screen that looks something like this: Step 4: Select the the disk that you’d.
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