Cloning C: Drive

[Deleted member 70857]

What is the best way to do this?

My Dad has had his PC for about 5 years now and has some very important documents on it. The HDD is less than 250GB so what is the best way to clone the drive, so that if the drive does die, I can just swap in the one that has been cloned to

 

[Dervious]

Use Macrium Reflect or Easeus Todo Backup.

You can either clone the drive, as is, or you can create a backup image. This image can be compressed, so it will take up less space than a full clone (although you would have to restore the image if you wanted to use it).

The advantage of creating an image is that it can be burned to DVDs or even Blu-Ray, so you really don't need to use another drive.

Personally, I prefer to use Easeus Todo. I create the image of the drive onto another drive, setting the option to split the file into DVD sized chunks. I then burn the files onto DVDs. I use this method because whenever I`ve attempted create the image straight onto DVDs, the reulting restoration process seems to require a lot of disc swapping. The disadvantage of using my method is that you will need a hard drive to copy the image files onto, and probably a working PC to restore the files to the new hard drive.

 

[hawkhench]

Get a 8/16GB USB stick as well, and set it to back up his documents (which would be updated since the clone) to it. Or depending on how computer literate he is, just tell him to save them to the USB stick from now on or set up Dropbox if his stuff isn't too space intensive.

 

[Mp4]

Glad I found this been faffing and re-installing windows for my mother as she fluffed up her windows full of malware and virus

So now all installed again and cloned using Easeus Todo Backup!

So easy and recommended