Cloning hard disk with the Disk Image feature of Handy Backup software

The Disk Image function in Handy Backup allows creating a hard disk image by addressing queries directly to HDD sectors, rather than to file system. The procedure of backing up a partition or an entire drive, followed by their restoration to different locations can be used for hard disk cloning. Whether you want to clone computer many times, or plainly transfer a system to a different hard disk, Handy Backup will be an effective tool to do it. Learn about possible reasons to clone hard drive…

Disk Cloning with Image Backup

As you have created a hard drive image backup, you can easily restore it to a place different than the original. The resulting copy will be absolutely identical and will contain all data including all files and applications. This way you can also clone boot disk: the new hard drive will have all boot records, and if you exchange it with the old one, it will successfully load the cloned operating system without any troubles.

Note: When you clone hard disk, remember about license agreements that apply to the software you use. Most programs that are commonly installed on a computer are allowed to be used it on a single PC only.

Features of Hard Disk Cloning

Below is the list of main features regarding the hard disk clone ability in Handy Backup:

• Copy all HDD contents. The restoration of a disk image to a new location results in creation of a full system clone which preserves hidden and system files, boot information and all contents.
• Clone the entire hard drive or any partition. Handy Backup allows you to perform full hard drive cloning with all partitions and partition table, or clone these components separately.
• Processing sectors with data only. Handy Backup automatically skips disk sectors that don't contain files, which results in a reduction of size of the created image and provides a way to clone partition to a smaller one.
• Support for different file systems. Disk image backup is created without querying the file system, and therefore doesn't depend on it. Besides Windows backup, Handy Backup allows cloning Linux SWAP, Ext2, Ext3, HPFS, ReiserFS and other files systems.

To learn more about our backup&cloning program, please see Handy Backup features...

HDD Repartitioning

Currently, Handy Backup is not capable of repartitioning hard drives. This means that if you restore your image backup to a hard drive of a larger size, the remaining disk space will stay unallocated and will need to be configured with an external tool, e.g. Windows Disk Management Utility (for Windows). Restoration of images to destinations of smaller size is recommended for people with strong technical skills only, as it may result in corruption of data and incorrect operation of the clone. For more details, refer to the User Manual.

By default, the Image Backup functionality is included into Handy Backup Professional edition. If you want to use it and clone hard drives and partitions within the Standard edition, you may order it as an additional backup plug-in.