whats the best and easiest cloning software to use ?

I got an SSD for my computer and want to clone over the OS and everything. I have all my personal documents backed up onto an external incase something goes wrong.

whats the best and easist software to use. I thought about using clonezilla but its telling me I need to download this and that to make the USB a boot Flash drive. I already have the Software to make my USB a Boot Flash drive. I just want the damn software to make an ISO image of my OS. running windows 7.

 

The easiest way to make a bootable clonezilla is to use unetbootin (you can tell it to download the clonezilla iso and to make the bootable flash drive afterwards) and then just clone, but it will not allow you to clone to a smaller drive if I recall correctly. Acronis (not free) works well enough, you can also use something like EaseUS Partition Master, Paragon, etc.

Every time I needed to clone something, I used a clonezilla live disc (or flash drive).

 

It wouldnt let me do it cuase the destination disk is smaller than the source. I only have about 50GB on my HDD that im gonna clone over to my 120GB SSD.

 

Download Parted Magic. It has Gparted and Clonezilla and a bunch of other tools. You can use Gparted to resize the large partition on the old drive. Once the partition on the old drive is smaller than the new drive you can use Clonezilla.

 

You can try Macrium Reflect too, I don't know if it resizes the partition for you, but you can always resize before cloning.

 

I have and use Acronis true image 2013 for backups on cd and it works great just make sure your destination has enough space. I use a 1tb external usb drive to store my laptop images from the acronis that loads it's program off the cd and never stores itself on the drive itself and works great for my needs and I do the same for my desktop as well just that my desktop has plenty of extra drives that I store my desktop image to. But that is what I found usefully after making a image of Acronis on CD I never needed the program install to use unless I need to recreate another backup cd to use again. One think I like about it will make to fit on the drive ie let say your O/S and program is 40gig big our of 500gig main drive and the source is 1tb storeage drive that would compress to 20gig roughly and let say you get a 1tb main drive and then you reimage back to the main drive it will ask to fit and format to the drive and you say yes and when your done rebooting it fits onto the larger drive as though it was one single drive without any partitions or reformatting. That is the feature I like about Acronis it is smart enough to think ahead...

 

Yeah, but Acronis is not free, so the OP has to be willing to pay for that. Still, great tool and if the OP has an Intel SSD, he can actually download the Intel cloning tool which happens to be Acronis, but locked for Intel drives.

 

True it's a paid program and you get the full feature once you purchase the software but for what it's worth is well worth its money that it sells it for. But the downside is Macrium Reflect is it can't run from cd/dvd media which Acronis could do making it a portable program as needed.

 

wont let me shrink the partion more than 367GB and the partion size is 750GB with only 55GB used. My SSD holds 120GB




ive only tried device to device. what does Device-Image do exactly ? is that what I need to transfer just the Data used on the partion to another Partion ?

 

There any Free Software that lets you clone just the used data on the partion to another Partion ?

 

Yes, it's called copy + paste.

You really don't need cloning/imaging software to back up or duplicate user data; it's really more ideal for creating a system image to transfer to another drive so that you have that to fall back on in the case of hardware failure.

 

If you just want data, you can try 7-zip ( 7-Zip).

I sometimes use it with the these parms: 'a mydata.7z *' to get/archive stuff into a file such as 'mydata.7z' and it grabs everything, including subdirs/folders and shoves 'em into one packed file. In addition, it keeps the old timestamps on the files, which I prefer.

I then unpack/extract it on the destination drive: 'e mydata.7z' for individual files, 'x mydata.7z' to restore data + folders.

I do a lot of my work from DOS windows and use the .exe/DOS version you can grab from the website. Very handy and works well from .bat files, too, for repeated tasks.

Easy way to back up data, too.

Worth a look...

 

i used Paragon Migrate OS to SSD - System Migration auf Solid State Drives (SSD)
no problems...

 

This is what I expected would happen to some that tried to do this. I mentioned before that I used Acronis home image 2013 and it will allow for resizing to match that is larger then the source drive and most others dismissed using the software because it was a paid program but as said you get what you pay for. And just having that option is well worth the 50US for it. And before I forget you can install it and created a cd to boot off that will have Acronis on it that will do the same as if the program was installed on the hard drive but a full program running from the cd itself.

 

i am sort of a novice in this regard, so take what i say with a grain of salt. when i bought a new SSD (256GB) to replace the 500GB HDD on my laptop, i used Norton Ghost (version 11.5) to move my data from the original HDD to the new SSD, which clearly has a lower capacity. it worked perfectly, since i told it to ignore the free space and only move the data. given that my version of Norton Ghost is quite old, i'm not sure if it'll work on UEFI drivers though.

 

I am surprised that nobody mentions about Windows backup. It is free and comes with OS. To darxide, if you install OS under legacy BIOS, I don't think you can clone it and use it on UEFI. You have to reinstall everything again.

 

^ i know i was just mentioning my own experience (Windows 7 + Legacy option in BIOS) with Norton Ghost.

 

marcium reflect