Good Drive Cloning Software?

donavannj

So, basically, I've not been very diligent in maintaining current backups of my primary PC, and I found out Sunday that one of my drives is likely damaged (not sure which; heard the noises at bootup and shut the machine down ASAP). There's a fair bit of data on there that I'd like to keep. Is there a quick, bootable drive cloning utility that I could use to move the data on the drive to another, not damaged drive?

I'm more concerned with quick evacuation of the data rather than keeping the image of the system intact.

bowen

http://clonezilla.org/

If you're confident enough to handle command line/linux cloning software

Zxerol

Also, if you're interested in data and don't care about a whole disk image, you can grab any number of Linux distros and copy/rsync whatever you need.

donavannj

bowen wrote: »

http://clonezilla.org/

If you're confident enough to handle command line/linux cloning software

I don't normally deal in Linux or CLI, but I don't think I'll have much difficulty. I'll probably try it in a couple of days when I get the chance.

Mugsley

If either your source or target drive is a Samsung, their drive utilities support cloning (and have a fairly simple interface). I've also had very good experience with Acronis True Image. There's a cost but it's relatively low. I see sales/markdowns for it regularly in my Newegg emails.

donavannj

I've got Acronis True Image Home 2010 that I used to make my last system image somewhere around 2 years ago. I picked that up because the corporate version is what my department uses for individual machine imaging at work, but after using it for a few years at work, I know that has a low tolerance for faulty hardware.

No Samsung drives involved at the moment, so no Samsung utilities at my disposal.

Synthesis

donavannj wrote: »

So, basically, I've not been very diligent in maintaining current backups of my primary PC, and I found out Sunday that one of my drives is likely damaged (not sure which; heard the noises at bootup and shut the machine down ASAP). There's a fair bit of data on there that I'd like to keep. Is there a quick, bootable drive cloning utility that I could use to move the data on the drive to another, not damaged drive?

I'm more concerned with quick evacuation of the data rather than keeping the image of the system intact.

I use AOMEI Backupper Standard, which is free and seems to do what you need. Before I upgraded to Windows 10, I made a complete one-to-one drive image copy of my boot drive so I could swap back as if nothing happened. Disk images offer the ability to make a perfect copy, but to do so on a boot drive you'll need to use the program's intergrated boot functions.