HDD Cloning

HDD Cloning, is making an exact copy of one hard disk drive to another hard disk drive, including partition information, boot sectors, operating systems installation, and application software to replicate the hard disk drive on another system or recover from a hard drive crash. Often during HDD cloning the contents of the being cloned drive are written to an image (image backup) file(s) as an intermediate step, and the clone drive is loaded from the image backup.

The disk image file(s) is(are) usually created based upon the sectors on the medium, ignoring its filing system. The intermediate image backup file(s) 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.

Under HDD cloning it is often meant HDD duplicating, HDD imaging or HDD copying. The most right term seems to be the HDD duplicating since it has the same target (another HDD) as the HDD cloning. HDD imaging differs from HDD cloning in that the intermediate image file can be placed not only on an HDD but on another 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, i.e. the boot sector, FAT, some system files are hardly copied, whereas copying all this information is an integral part of HDD cloning process.

Typically, to perform HDD cloning special software is required. Handy Backup is an affordable and reliable HDD cloning and imaging backup and restore utility. Handy Backup has rich set of functions and features and can perform image backup of some types of storage media recognizable by Windows. The available for image backup devices are not limited to hard disk drives, the requirement is that they should have file system compatible with FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, thus they can include HDDs, external USB and FireWire drives, USB flash drives. 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 the image file splitting and image protection can be applied.

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.

Read more about image backup function of Handy Backup...

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