DWalt
Member
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.
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.
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