Cloning a Hard Drive

Much has been made over the years about the importance of backing up files from your hard drive. Recovery disks are becoming a normal routine when buying a new computer, a disk that can restore your computer to the first day that bought it. But what if that is simply not enough? In the event of a computing disaster and all of your data is lost you may find that a few important files on a backup or the prospect of getting your computer back to its beginning are not appealing options. Another option is available to you if you have he available hardware. This final option is hard drive cloning.

Hard drive cloning has been around for a while, the most popular program being Norton Ghost, Ghost is a very capable and sturdy application, it does however cost in the region of £40 and for a one off use can be a little expensive for the task. Fortunately there are options out there. The one we are looking at is CloneZilla, the major benefit of this application is that its free to use, always a major plus point for most people. CloneZilla has the ability to create an image file of your hard drive for backup when required, or it can copy an entire disk or partition to another disk or partition such as when upgrading to a larger hard drive.

At this point you should note that when making major changes to hardware on your PC, Microsoft Windows requires re-activating and you may be required to buy a new licence if your copy of Windows was bundled specifically with your PC. Microsoft have made the claim that the motherboard is the key component here, if you transfer the data to a machine that has a different motherboard then windows will prompt for a new licence. Something that many users consider just a little unfair in the respect that an upgraded computer requires buying Windows all over again. Read more here.

Back to CloneZilla, obviously the first thing you will require when attempting to clone your hard drive is to get the software, unless you have already bought Norton Ghost or similar program then I suggest you download CloneZilla. There are two versions of CloneZilla available for use. The first is CloneZilla Live, the live version is for single drive use, this is the best solution for copying one hard drive to another or a single partition to another. The Second is CloneZilla SE, SE is the Server Edition, this version allows for multiple copying of the single drive image over a network, CloneZilla Server Edition can do over 40 machines on your network all at the same time.

This article will presume the you are going for a simple one off clone. CloneZilla makes the process very easy and you only require a small amount of technical knowledge to get the desired result. Probably the most difficult part for anyone who doesn't have a great deal of know how when it comes to computers is setting up CloneZilla. Because of the nature of what disk cloning involves you cannot have windows or any other operating system running at the time. In order for this to work CloneZilla must be placed onto a bootable disk. You may have noticed when you downloaded the program it was in an ISO format. This file type is a disk image and is used to create (Usually) CD's. In order to burn an image file to a CD you will require CD burning software such as NERO. Many people will have some sort of available software as they tend to get bundled in with new PC's and Laptops to complement the writable optical drives they are supplied with. If you haven't got such a program then a free burning software program can be found at http://www.freeisoburner.com/.

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