Cloning a hard drive is the process of copying it exactly, byte-for-byte, to a new hard drive. It’s a much used technique for users that are looking to upgrade their hard drives, as the alternative is backing up your data (not the fastest process, even with using one of our ) and then reinstalling and reconfiguring your operating system.

Why Clone Your Hard Drive? By cloning your hard drive you avoid the hassle of reinstalling Windows. You won’t have to tweak any settings you’ve changed.

If you’ve had to wait patiently while Windows installs its never-ending updates, know that if you clone at least you won’t have to go through that again. Cloning is the best way to transfer your data when upgrading your hard drive.

Today, I’ll show you how to clone a hard drive in Windows 10 with free software. Using a tool called, this process usually only takes an hour or less. SSD drives were very expensive just a few years ago, and now that prices have dropped many users want to upgrade that 64GB/128GB SSD to a 256GB/512GB SSD instead. Portable ccleaner for mac. You can use this method to clone a traditional hard drive to a new SSD drive in Windows 10, or you can clone a smaller SSD to a larger SSD. What You’ll Need I’ll assume you have two drives already: the old one you intend to clone, and the new one we’ll call the “target.” Remember, the new drive must be the same size or larger than the old one.

Clonezilla is a partition and disk imaging/cloning program similar to True Image® or Norton Ghost®. It helps you to do system deployment, bare metal backup and recovery.

If you have an external hard drive or a flash drive, it’s a good idea to make a backup before you begin this process. You can save some time by transferring any media files you have to an external drive as well. Cloning a hard drive creates a byte-for-byte replica, including the operating system, drivers, your documents and other important files. Transferring large media libraries beforehand will save you quite a bit of time during the cloning process, but is entirely optional. While I use Macrium throughout this article, there are also several alternatives you can use. One of these is, a LiveCD.

You boot Clonezilla from a CD/DVD or flash drive, unlike Macrium, which you can use from within Windows. I use Macrium in this article because it makes it incredibly easy to clone a hard drive for Windows 10 and is free to use, to boot.

Cloning vs Imaging Windows has a built in utility to create a system image, but this isn’t exactly the same as cloning. An image is a compressed snapshot of either a disk drive or a partition on that disk drive. If you feel imaging is the way to go in your situation, check out our article on. Say you just wanted to clone the C: drive in Windows 10 rather than the entire disk — in this case, you’d be better off making an image of the C: drive with the built-in tools in Windows 10. You could install your new hard drive or SSD, boot your computer using a Windows System Recovery CD/USB, and select the image you made to restore from.

Cloning copies everything, including the bootloader. It’s not compressed. You can store multiple images on a hard disk, but a cloned disk will take up all of the free space. It’s an exact replica of your current drive. How to Clone a Hard Disk in Windows 10 with Macrium Whether you’re cloning a traditional hard disk to an SSD or cloning a smaller drive to a larger drive, Macrium will meet your needs. Download and install Macrium for home use. Once you finish installation, open the app.