Plus, the best cloning software protects your data with stringent protection measures, something that we will discuss later in this write-up. Since a hard drive cloning software clones your operating system and encompassing drives, you can rest assured that you will be able to recover data, no matter how bad the situation is. How would you deal with such a situation at the eleventh hour when what’s at stake is more than just your data? You might develop bad sectors on your drive. You might experience a sudden computer crash or the same could also happen to one of your hard drives or even your SSD. Unforeseen mishaps and disasters are unavoidable. You will also find out about some free disk cloning software to use on Windows PC. Here we will talk about some of the best hard drive and SSD cloning software.

In case, your original hard drive fails, you can remove it and replace it with a cloned drive. A disk clone creates an uncompressed and exact replica of your hard drive.

Home users primarily use an HDD cloning software, and system administrators use an HDD cloning software to move data from one computer to another. In simple terms, if your original SSD fails or HDD fails, a clone will come in handy. If ever you want to set up several computers with the same configurations, reboot your computer to an existing version, replace a damaged hard drive or recover your system in case of a computer failure, disk cloning software is the tool you are searching for. So compressing the disk image or copying to a sparse aware filesystem as other answers on Internet suggest is not what I'm looking for.A disk imaging software is an application that replicates or creates exact copies of your computer’s operating system, its hard drives, the inherent software applications, their patches, and a lot more as a backup. The point is, I don't care about the size the image is taking in the backup, but I care about the size that's transferred back to SD card, because copying to SD card is slow and copying 14GB of useless data is pointless. When I already created image of whole SD card, how can I truncate it to not include useless junk?.How can I create image without copying what's after the last partition?.However, now I need to write this image back to the SD card but I don't want to write 14GB of trailing zeros/junk! That'd take ages. Here're the details of the (uncompressed) image: $ du -h sdcard.img I've created the image with: cat /dev/sdd | gzip >Īnd I was happy because $ du -h I've an image of a bootable 16GB SD card.

Free disk image creator