The easy way to clone a hard drive or SSD | AOMEI Backupper

In this video I'm going to clone the hard drive in this computer. That will mean that in the event of a catastrophic failure you will have a fully working hard drive which you can simply put in your computer and start the computer up again. To clone the hard drive on the computer we're going to need a suitable destination drive. We could use either of these two. They do look quite different. That is a 3.5" out of a desktop computer which is 500Gb in size. The smaller one is a 2.5" which is typically found in a laptop and that one is 600Gb in size. We could actually use either of these two but I'm actually going to use the smaller one. By far the easiest way of connecting a hard drive to a USB is using a cable like that. That is a SATA to USB 3 cable. What you need to do with that is take it, plug that into the hard drive like so, you can then simply plug the USB plug into the USB port on the computer. You will notice that the lead is a little bit short so I'm just going to put that down on the box and then we don't damage the lead or the USB port. This is the easiest way of doing it simply with a lead like that. If you don't want to do that you can actually use the SATA leads that are already inside the computer or you may have to buy an additional SATA lead but by far the easiest way is to use a USB to SATA cable. You can also use an ICY dock if you wanted to, basically you need to connect the hard drive to the computer in order to clone the hard drive. So I'm now going to switch the computer on. I am now going to click on this PC you can now see that the new drive appears as ADATA or K drive. This is the drive that I'm going to use for the clone you will notice that it is 100 GB larger than the source drive or C Drive in the computer. The C drive normally contains the operating system in some computers this is much simpler as there is only one hard drive. You can see that K drive is almost full before we can clone to this drive we need to format it. So right click on the drive select format then click start then click on ok. If this message pops up just click on yes.This is now going to take a few minutes. The software that I'm going to use to do the cloning is completely free. I will put a link in the description to the download page. I've used this software several times and it's really easy to use even with older operating systems such as Windows 7. When the format complete window opens you can click OK and close down this PC. This will of course be my computer if you are on Windows 7. It's a good idea to close down any programs that are open as it could interfere with the clone. Cloning a hard drive can take several hours depending on the size of the drive. We are now going to open up AOMEI backup by double-clicking on the icon. This is a free version and works really well. Once that loads I'm clicking on the clone then disk clone You then need to select the disk that you wish to clone in most cases this will be C drive. It's absolutely critical that you get the correct source and destination disk. Now click next and select the destination disk which in this case is disk K. Click on that then click next. Read the warning and then click yes. When you're cloning a hard drive you either need a disk which is the same size as the source disk or a larger disk. You now have a couple of options the sector by sector clone option will clone all sectors regardless of whether they are used or if they are bad sectors. This option takes much longer. A line pertition to optimize for SSD this should be checked if you are cloning to a solid-state drive. If you are cloning from a smaller disk to a larger disk you need to click on edit petitions on the destination disk. Copy without resizing partitions can be selected if you are cloning a hard drive or SSD to the same size destination disk. But if you are cloning to a larger disk you need to check the add unused space to all petitions checkbox or else your destination drive will be made the exact same size as your source disk. You can see that if you don't check the add unused space to all petitions checkbox you will end up wasting space on the destination disk. Now click ok. Now check the information is correct and then click the start clone button. If you want the computer to shut down on completion you can tick the checkbox this is useful if you're going to leave your computer to do the cloning at night. It will now take a couple of hours for the computer to clone the drive Once that is at 100% we can then click on finish we can then close the program down. We're now going to eject the drive, unplug the hard drive and then shut down the computer. So that's the hard drive that I've just unplugged and I'm now going to remove the SATA to USB cable. I happen to know that this computer uses an SSD to boot up which is located behind this panel so I'm just going to unscrew this side panel and remove that. What we need to do now is unplug the two connectors, plug those into the drive that we have just copied and we're actually just putting this into the computer just to test that it works as soon as we know that it works we can shut the computer down and swap that right back over. I'm now going to switch the computer back on and if it has worked correctly we should be able to boot from the new hard drive. As you can see that has worked perfectly I'm now going to switch the computer off and swap the hard drives back over. So that's how to clone a hard drive it's very useful if anything does happen to the hard drive in the computer you always have a fully working backup. It's a good idea to keep this in a safe place this will now go in an anti-static bag and will be placed in a fire safe. I hope you found this video useful if you have and you haven't done so already please subscribe to the channel.

Channel: Ultimate Handyman

Views: 463,829

Keywords: Easy way to clone hard drive, clone hard drive, clone SSD, clone solid state drive, hard drive cloning software, AOMEI Backupper

Id: Z9v30Wm-DZo

Length: 8min 48sec (528 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 22 2018