Easy FREE Disk Cloning & Drive Migration With Disk Genius Free Macrium Reflect Alternative

what is Mike from Mike's unboxing reviews on how to and on today's video we're going to take a look at three options for disk cloning if maybe you've bought yourself a nice new shiny nvme drive or perhaps you're trying to swap out maybe an older two and a half inch drive and you're doing some upgrades you want to clone your hard drive or migrate your hard drive from one disk to another there used to be a go-to option which was known as the macrium reflect the free edition which was absolutely great and a lot of us used it but sadly they have actually taken that away now so that is only a paid option so actually I was looking around for some various pieces of software to see what would be a good replacement for that because it's not something I do on a tremendously regular basis but it's one of those handy tools to have in your Arsenal and possibly you may even want to keep it on your systems to do things like incoming or backups all that kind of stuff which a lot of these software packages do so I have been looking around to see what is available and one which has actually stood out in front of all the others at the moment seems to be a program called disc genius now this is not sponsored or an Affiliated video in any way shape or form it is a free piece of software although there are paid for tiers of which if you want to apply for those or pay for those that is entirely down to you I don't get any commission or anything like that from you doing so so that is completely up to you but I wanted to take a look still just like do an installation do a data transfer and actually see what it's like and then come back at the end of the video to see if it's something I can recommend to our viewers so without a way let's get on and give it a go okay so before we get started just going to quickly go through what we're actually doing here so it makes it clear in your minds what is actually happening So currently in the machine there is our two terabyte drive which is nestled up in there which you'll probably get a close-up of shortly and what we've got is our one terabyte drive so what we're trying to do is free up some space now the drive isn't using all the capacity it's using less than a tenth of it so this is going to be absolutely great so we can take the two terabyte driver and use that for a game drive on another PC so I'm going to put this into another m.2 slot on the computer my most modern PCS will have multiple m.2 slots if you haven't you can always use something such as this which is the Oracle m.2 SSD enclosure you can get other types of USB drive enclosures all that kind of stuff choice is entirely up to you and obviously if you're using SATA drives the same applies you've probably got more in a one or two SATA ports on your motherboard so just use whichever suits you you can of course if you want to kind of do cross-platform so maybe you've got a SATA drive in your PC and you want to upgrade to nvme the same thing applies to the right just make sure that both drives are actually connected to the system before you start using the software so I'm going to quickly put this into the machine which is very straightforward to do and then we can start a machine up and get the cloning process started okay so the next part of it is to actually get disc genius so this is the website discgenius.com forward slash download or you can go to discgions.com forward slash free links will be in the video description as always options here disc genus free standard and professional we're obviously going to use free and you can download just click on free download and you'll get a pop-up very shortly after the system scan file and ask you where you want to save it we're just going to save this to our Windows desktop so now we can minimize that it's a very small file actually only uh 64 well 61.4 megabytes obviously it's going to be a little bit bigger than that when it's actually installed but yeah it's a quite a small footprint there so let's get this installation started so double click and you'll have your user account control and then you can choose your language of which there's English or not English and then you can read through the terms and conditions should you wish to or you can just choose accept now there is a warning here take care please do not install this application on the partition where you want to recover files because this does also file recovery as well or data recovery so obviously you don't want to install data recovery software on the drive you're actually trying to recover data from but for cloning and all that kind of stuff and backups it's absolutely fine so click on next and now we have the option to launch the program or go back to the website or do both we just want to launch this genius so click on finish and this is the main window so it's listing your drives there so the main drive there is our fiaxiang two terabyte nvme so two terabyte one terabyte and there's our drives the new Drive the solid digium hasn't been formatted it is a completely clean and new disc so that is why it's not showing any partitions or anything so it's you don't need to do anything to your drawers literally just throw them in the computer as long as they're recognizing the BIOS it's going to be absolutely fine so the options are you can do this in two ways so you can go through tools and you can choose for system migration or you can choose clean disk the choice is yours really both kind of do the same thing clone disk gives you a little bit more control so let's take a quick look at system migration so if you do that it immediately says to select your target disk so this is the disk that you're going to because it knows what you want to do it knows that you want to copy your Windows installation so this is great if you've just got a single main C drive no other partitions on it whatsoever then that's a good way of doing it it will do other partitions but this is basically just same right I know the operating system disk I'm going to transfer that onto our new Target disk so you can do that you can choose ok I'm going to cancel that and actually do it the other way so I'm going to do tools and I'm going to do clone disk you can also do clone partitions if you just want to do a partition you can do lots of options here but if we go into Source disk so there is our source disk so we can choose that as a source it says if you want to migrate the current system to Target us and make the target disputable is recommended to use system migration function do you want to use system migration right now so there you go there's a little bit of a warning so if you want to make it bootable and you want it to basically just work then system migration might be the easier way so we're going to flip back to system migration so again choose our Target disk again it already knows which is the main disk because the operating system is running on it it's showing us to select the target disk which is our mt1 terabyte drive and it says they're the disk ID solid the gym etc etc so I will choose ok I'll actually highlight it first then okay then it tells you that you can choose the partition size Etc so if you want to you can resize partitions you can slide these down so if you want to make a smaller partition you can do all that kind of cool stuff which might be handy so if you want just a very small Windows drive and then you want to actually turn this into like a D drive or games Drive something along those lines you can certainly do all that kind of stuff but I'm just going to leave it as it is for now and also you do have the options here at the bottom so when finished to change the computer boot sequence so you can actually allow it to go into the bars and choose which drive to boot from now in our particular instance I'm actually going to remove the C drive the initial two terabyte one and I'm going to swap their physical locations so I don't need to do that because I'm going to do it myself manually but if you're perhaps leaving the drives in place then you may want to do that so it is certainly an option also you've got the option there to prevent the system from sleeping during execution so if you've got a lot of data and it's going to take a long time you don't want your system from going into sleep so it will prevent it from doing that but essentially that is it so we know our Source disk is our main C drive you can see it's a c and our Target Drive is going to be the it's going to be local disk it's going to call it C after and make it bootable so we click on start and it'll say they're warning all files and partitions on the target disk will be overwritten are you sure you want to migrate the system to your slow the gym Drive yes we are so click ok and now we get the options so you can choose now to actually do hot migration so that is doing it actually within the windows environment as it is now or you can choose to install the windows PE module and get it to do it in a Windows PE environment which is basically outside of windows the choice is going to be down to the individual I would suggest if you're doing hot migration obviously don't try to use your computer other than what it's doing at the time so just idling along close down any applications which are unnecessary etc etc or you can just do the windows PE module which will essentially close down all of the tasks anyway and boot into another type of operating system so I'm going to choose hot migration for this instance and you can see that it's creating a snapshot and now you'll just see the files going across now this should be particularly quick because we're going from a PCO Express Gen4 to a PCR Express gem4 so yeah you can see the data is absolutely flying across there so it shouldn't take very long it's only a very small operating system basic install OBS and a few other things on there so there isn't a great deal of information there obviously if you have more things installed on your drive then the longer it's going to take and obviously if you've got a slower system slower drives etc etc all those things will have a bearing on how long this process will actually take but it looks like this is probably going to take just around about a minute so I will let that carry on and we'll come back when it's finished although it is almost finished anyway and there we go that has uh completely finished and took just over one minute absolutely fantastic speed there so you've got the option here so it says system migration is completed to boot from the target system please reboot to boss and set the target disk as boot device do you want to restart your computer now so no I don't want to do that now and that is essentially it so we can choose Complete because we are complete closes all these windows down and now I can turn off my OBS recording turn off the computer physically swap the two drives around and we're pretty much done so I'm gonna do that now so that was pretty painless and I'm very impressed the system is working you can see behind me it is actually turned on and it worked first time all I've done is taken a two terabyte drive which was in the machine cleaned it onto this one terabyte drive because we want a smaller drive because we're not using the full capacity and now we've got ourselves a spare two terabyte drive which all the data is on so if you want to you could use this for basically creating backups if you want to the choice is entirely up to you if you want to use something like this the Oracle m.2 SSD enclosure you can have your drives in these and just do incremental backups should you wish to essentially the software is pretty powerful I like the migration thing that works really well to be fair I didn't have a great deal of information actually on the drive but if you are someone who is uh basically working for a living and time is money I think this is well worth it and the fact that it's a free piece of software as well and appears to work exceptionally well it certainly gets my thumb and seal of approval if you want to see more stuff about this genius and other things it can do let us know in that comment section below but for now I think that is going to wrap things up I've been Mike this is Mike's unboxing reviews and how to and hopefully we'll catch you in the very next video thanks for watching

Channel: Mike's unboxing, reviews and how to

Views: 42,344

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Id: sOv1IWCyB8w

Length: 11min 47sec (707 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 12 2023