Hard drives may look simple on the surface, but there’s a lot of things under the hood that make them work exactly the way they’re supposed to. This is why hard disk cloning is not just a matter of copying and pasting, but rather a rather complicated process.
Fortunately, there are great free applications that allow you to clone a hard drive on your Mac or Windows computer with ease. All you need is the source disk, the disk you want to clone, and the destination disk. Here’s how to clone a hard drive on a Mac or Windows computer.
Read more: The best external hard drives you can buy
quick answer
To clone a hard drive on Windows, download Macrium Reflect Free, connect both drives and click Clone this drive under the source disk. To clone a hard drive on a Mac, download SuperDuper, select the disks, and click Copy Now.
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How to clone a hard drive on Windows
Windows has quite a few apps that let you clone a hard drive, but the best one is Macrium Reflect Free. Download it from the site and install it. The installation process is a little more complicated than the normal process, but just follow the flow and you should be good to go. Make sure both drives are connected to your computer i.e. the drive you want to clone and the destination drive. Run the program when it is installed and you will see this screen, with a list of hard disks.
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Make sure the box next to the source drive is checked, and click Clone this disc option under the source disk.
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click Select a disk to clone to. It will give you a list of available disks.
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Select the destination disk from the list by clicking on it.
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Once selected, tap next one moving forward.
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Macrium will give you an option to schedule the cloning, but you can skip that by clicking next one.
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Check the details listed, and click ending.
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Macrium will give you another final screen with options. You can uncheck the box next to Save as backup profile If this is a one-time clone and click yes.
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You will see a warning about the destination drive losing all data. Check the box next to All target sizes will be overwritten. Confirm to continue. click Complete.
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It will take some time, about five minutes in general. When finished, you will get a success dialog. That’s it, your drive will be cloned successfully. If you want to boot from the cloned drive, you can select it from the boot drive selection menu right after you start your computer.
Read more: The best internal and external hard drives you can buy
How to Clone Hard Drive for Mac
For Mac, we recommend using SuperDuper to clone your hard drive. Download and install it from the official website. Once installed, launch the application. Select the source disk by clicking the dropdown menu next to copyand the destination disk from the dropdown list next to to me.
tap on copy now button to start cloning. You will see the progress in the application. It will take some time and finish cloning.
The process will not differ much from the one we described above. Simply connect the drive to the docking station, then follow the procedure with the recommended apps above.
Imaging is more useful for creating backup images, while cloning is better for creating a replica that can replace your existing drive.