How to Clone a Hard Drive like a PC Professional

Cloning a hard drive is probably the safest way to ensure all of your important data and files are backed up along with any programs you have installed at the time. Unlike backing up individual files and folders when you clone a hard drive you actually create a complete mirror image of everything that is there at the time.

In this article I want to explain how to clone a hard drive using one of the most popular pieces of software for doing this Acronis True Image.

Acronis is the most versatile clone hard drive software on the market and takes it one step further. While it does clone your entire hard disk it also creates a disaster recovery system where you can completely restore your entire PC from in the event of a data disaster.

Getting Started

There are other software titles available that allow you to image a hard drive, the other most popular title that comes to mind is Norton Ghost. I’ve nothing against this product, but after doing some initial research on both Norton and Acronis I discovered some people who’s cloned drives didn’t work as expected in the face of a disaster.

So to get started I suggest picking up a copy of Acronis True Image Home if you don’t already have one. It’s available for immediate download here from the Official Acronis Website.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed Acronis you’re ready to get started.

When you first start up Acronis you will be prompted if you’d like to make a Full System backup (clone your drive and all software). You don’t have to do it right at this point as you can make a complete backup later, but if you want to get started right away go ahead and select it now.

If you opt not to do it right away, here’s the procedure.

Choose “Backup and Restore” once you’ve started Acronis True Image, then select what type of backup you want to create. The “My Computer” option is probably the best choice as this will make a complete image of any disks, partitions etc. you select.

For straight forward sake, in the side window of Acronis select the complete hard drive you want to clone. This will ensure that all data and partitions on that drive are copied.

From this point there are other options you need to choose in Acronis to clone a hard drive, but if you leave the default selections set your copy will turn out fine so long as this is the first time you done the complete backup.

Why you need to Clone a Hard Drive

With the huge space required by many programs today it can take hours if not days to reinstall programs like windows and other productivity titles. Not to mention the bast number of software programs that are now bought 100% online and downloaded. If you lose the data it’s gone there is no CD to re-install it.

Therefore making a complete clone of a hard drive is a safe way to ensure you still have the data for later.