HDD Cloning

HDD cloning is a process of copying one hard disk drive to another hard disk drive, including partition information, boot sectors, operating systems installation, and application software. Generally, its main purpose is to replicate data of the hard disk drive on another system, or recover from a hard drive crash. Often during hard disk cloning the contents of the being cloned drive are written to a disk image (image backup) file(s) as an intermediate step, and then the backup is restored to a differend HDD, resulting in a hard drive clone.

The disk image file is usually created based on sectors-by-sector medium copying which ignores its file system. The intermediate backup file can itself be used as complete archive of the cloned drive. Disk images can be used to transfer a hard drive's contents during a hardware upgrade, to restore a hard drive's contents during disaster recovery, or when a hard drive is erased, and to transfer the contents of a hard drive from one computer to another.

The term HDD cloning it is often used to describe HDD duplicating, HDD imaging, or HDD copying. The most correct term here seems to be HDD duplication, as it implies the use of another HDD as a target of drive cloning procedure. HDD imaging differs from HDD cloning in that the intermediate image file can be placed not only on an HDD but on any other backup storage media as well. The last term, HDD copy, usually implies the copy of all resided on an HDD information that can be accessed by means of the active operation system. This means that the boot sector, file allocation table (FAT) and system files can't be copied. The only way of copying system information is HDD cloning.

Typically, to perform hard disk drive cloning special software is required. Handy Backup is an affordable and reliable HDD cloning, imaging and backup utility. Handy Backup has a rich set of features and can perform image backup of any physical devices (including USB backup and FireWire drive backup) that are not limited by OS and may have different file system than supported by Windows.

See the full list of Handy Backup features...

Handy Backup allows performing external & internal drive image backup, disk to partition backup, copying partitions to another location, and much more. In the process of building an image, image file splitting and image protection can be enabled.

Handy Backup is a product that offers a reasonable balance between performance and ease of use and can be recommended not only to IT specialists but to everyone who needs to safely backup their data.

For a detailed guide on using image backup, refer to Image Backup in the User Manual.