Several months back I made a posting about wanting to clone the hard drives on my three laptops just for extra security. Some time ago I bought four used 2.5" hard drives off eBay, 2- 500 GB and 2- 1TB. I think I paid less than $10 each for the 500s and $15 each for the 1TBs. They were all clean and formatted when I got them. Also I bought a cheapie USB HDD enclosure, I think it was also around $10-15, but I don't remember. After a lot of procrastination, today I finally did it. I looked around at all the free cloning software (there is a lot of it) and decided on using DiskGenius. It can be used for cloning drives, and a whole lot more, like data recovery, making backups, and setting up partitions. Simple to download the software from their website, and simple to use. Their website provides very clear instructions on exactly how to use all the functions. However the free version capabilities are limited for more complex uses, and you must pay for those. However, drive cloning is part of the free menu.

All that is needed is to download the software from the DiskGenius website and install it. It takes longer to explain it than it does to install it, just a few minutes. The used HDDs I bought were used as targets for cloning, just put them in the enclosure and plug it into the USB slot on the laptop. Then run the software. Essentially all you need to do is select the source drive (the one inside the laptop), the target drive, answer a few questions, then click on the start button. The target drives do need to be no smaller capacity than the source drives. It took about 90 minutes each to transfer everything on the source drives to the target drives. It is important to note that EVERYTHING on the source drive is transferred exactly to the target drive, even the operating system. So now, if I ever get another HDD failure, all I have to do is swap out the old drive inside the computer with the cloned drive and I am back in business. And that is not very difficult - many YouTube videos on how it's done. You can do exactly the same thing if you want to replace your HDD with a new SSD for more speed. If you want to update your cloned drives with new files, that can easily be done by putting the cloned HDD in the enclosure and adding or copying any new files. DiscGenius will also do that. I was a little reluctant to embark on the project, but as it turned out, there was really nothing much to it. In fact, if you have a desktop computer with two HDD bays, you can make one the primary source and the other as a target. And just re-clone from the source to the target occasionally. That way, you will never need to worry about losing valuable files.

The reason I decided to do this today was that I have a friend whose son recently lost all of his valuable files on the HDD which completely failed. He is going to need to send off the dead drive to Dallas to recover them. No place locally does HDD rescues. That will cost him somewhere between $1000 to $1500 IF it can even be done. That taught him the value of doing file backups occasionally.

Make a suggestion.
Once you get the cloning done, try and recover some of the data.
Take notes on how you did it for a couple of reasons.
One, to make sure the recovery works the way you think it should.
Two, if/when you have problems you will not be in the mood to learn how to do it.

While I did not attempt booting into windows from the cloned drives, I did check a sample of the files on each, and they all seemed to come up OK.

Free is good - as long as it works. Sounds like you found a good one. I've always used Macrium Reflect for hard drive cloning. It works well, too. I like to clone mine every few years just in case.

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Or something like that . . .

In the last two years I have needed to do a clean re-install of Windows on two of my laptops. It could have been worse, but I had backups of most of my important data files - tax files, spreadsheets, word documents, etc. It isn't my idea of having a fun time, much easier to just swap hard drives. The main hesitation I had with using DiskGenius is that it is Chinese, but it had lots of good reviews. I doubt the Chicoms would have much interest in anything I have on my HDs. DiskGenius Free Edition - Free Partition Manager for Windows

Additionally, DiskGenius will also allow you to migrate a copy of your operating system to a bootable USB drive or SD chip. So if you ever have a problem logging into your Windows, you can always boot up using the portable drive. All you need to do is change the boot order in your BIOS.

I store valuable/personal data on removable data sticks. The information is not on the hard drive so if it crashes, my data is not lost. Also by storing it on data sticks, it is not on the computer's hard drive if your get hacked. It is a whole lot easier plugging in a data stick then jerry-rigging a spare hard drive to the computer.

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Bill

I have 6 portable hard drives, and at least a couple dozen flash drives...I guess AKA removable data sticks.

They both plug into a USB port on the front or back of my PC. There is no "jerry-rigging" a portable drive to a PC.

I have 2 standard hard drives in enclosures, same for them, one cord for power, and a USB plug.

Using ordinary USB thumb drives for file backup is fine so long as you are very, very careful to not lose it/them. Which can happen if you have lots of thumb drives laying around. I think it is better to use a larger dedicated external hard drive, preferably 3.0 USB, as backup, and clearly label it as a backup drive. It could also be partitioned to act as backup for multiple computers. Not nearly as likely to become misplaced or lost. A 500 Gb-1 TB external HDD is cheap these days, and probably will be large enough to hold every file you are likely to generate in a lifetime. Also a good idea to store it off premises when not in use, if possible, so in case your house burns down the backup won't be lost along with everything else. You could also backup onto a cloud drive, but that is more costly. I have considered doing that. Some cloud storage seems to be getting less expensive and more secure. Just Google "cheapest cloud storage."

Clonezilla is a good option I have used. You download the program and boot into BIOS using the program to create a bootable live USB drive, or hard drive to create the clone and to reload a system you boot into BIOS go from the storage media back to your hard drive on the PC. I have used it quite a bit on the Fedora Linux systems here with no problems but Linux is free and so is most software that you can load. I imagine it would work great with Windows since if you cloned back to your existing original system the software whether OS or paid for software should see the programs being reloaded on the same serial number or MAC address of machine that the software was originally installed on. There are some fine tutorials on setting up and using Clonezilla. The only offhand requirement I can think of is each creation of the system can only go to a USB/HD that is equal size or greater.

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KM
S&WCA 3110 S&WHF 625

I have used computers forever, have quite a bit of knowledge of their operation and associated software. I downloaded the program, but could not figure out how to operate it. Website did not help either. I cannot understand why these developers cannot develop something that a lay-person can use without an owners manual!!!

I had Acronis True Image software that kept 3 computers cloned every month or so. User friendly and its progressive operation walked me through the process easily. It no longer would load on my Windows 11 PC and they want $65 for the new program, so have been backing up my documents on a solid state drive just in case. I see that there is a more affordable EaseUS Disk Copy/Clone software out there and wonder if anyone has experience with it?

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Gary
SWCA 2515