Best Hard Drive Cloning Software

Need to clone your hard disk drive? In this article we go through three great disk cloning programs - Acronis Disk Director, EaseUS Todo Backup, and Clonezilla. 

Cloning your hard disk drive rather than simply copying data to it allows you to avoid reinstalling software and changing settings in the event that you need to swap out your main hard drive. When you clone a hard drive, you’ll be creating a full copy of everything stored on it, not just the data. This means that if your hard drive fails, or you need to upgrade to a drive with a higher storage capacity or a different storage medium like an SSD, you won’t need to reinstall all of your software and amend your settings – making the process much quicker. A backup clone drive can be kept within your PC’s chassis, or alternatively, you can clone a drive to a portable external hard drive. Here’s a rundown of some of the better disk cloning software out there.

Acronis Disk Director
This software not only allows you to clone your hard drive, but it comes with a whole host of other tools too. These include creating, labelling and formatting partitions and volume recovery. Disks can be formatted into virtually all formats, including FAT16, FAT32, Linux and NTFS. Acronis Disk Director is a Windows-only program, with no support for Apple OS or Linux. There is free demo available to download, but users are seriously restricted in what they can actually do; it will only clone disk volumes under 100MB. The full software can be bought for around £34.

EaseUS Todo Backup
This disk cloning software offers a wide range of functions, including system cloning, hard drive cloning and partition cloning; you can also perform simple back-ups.  Additional back-up modes include full, scheduled and incremental. In short, this is much more than a disk cloning program. The downside is that the disk cloning features are limited to the paid Home Edition – which costs around £30 for one year.

Clonezilla
Clonezilla is a fantastic disk imaging and cloning software, and it’s one that consistently ranks on “best free software” lists. We’ve sung the praises of Clonezilla before, and it’s definitely the best disk cloning tool if you don’t want to pay for a full version. Clonezilla can be used to create system backups, full drive clones, and supports a wide range of file systems too. You can also create a bootable USH flash drive to store Clonezilla on. The one downside of Clonezilla is that it’s interface is pretty bad, and reminds a lot of people of the dreaded blue screen of death. But if you can get past that, Clonezilla will be able to clone your hard disk drive, and more, for free.

Disk Cloning Software