#Hard drive image tools install
#Hard drive image tools full
#Hard drive image tools windows 10
#Hard drive image tools Pc

If your hard drive crashes and you have a recently cloned version laying around, you can simply pop it into your PC and act like nothing happened.Cloning a hard drive comes with several benefits that make it an easy way to get the most out of your storage solutions. To recap, imaging a drive is best suited for keeping backups of your OS and files - you can store multiple images on a single drive and you can schedule incremental and differential backups - but it can also be used when upgrading the hard drive in your PC.Ĭloning a drive is more suited for times when you're upgrading your hard drive - with an external enclosure, it's basically just a one-step process - but it can also be used in a backup situation. Because of the nature of cloning, the newly installed drive should boot just as though nothing had been changed, and you'll find Windows exactly as you left it.

#Hard drive image tools install

If you're swapping out your hard drive for something bigger and faster and don't want to deal with an intermediary external drive, you can grab an inexpensive enclosure, pop your new drive into it, clone directly onto it, and install it in your PC. That means you can connect hard drives meant for internal use through a USB port on your PC. These enclosures provide an environment similar to what is found inside a PC. The examples above outline cloning using an external drive as an intermediary, but what about cloning directly? That's where a hard-drive enclosure comes is. You can, of course, overwrite the clone on the hard drive in the case that you need the external drive for other storage. If this seems a bit confusing, we wrote a guide on this process that lays everything out for you to digest:īecause cloning creates an exact copy - no compression - of a hard drive, you can only clone to a hard drive once. Use Macrium Reflect to clone your hard drive (Image credit: Windows Central)įor example, you can clone your PC's hard drive to an external drive, swap out the PC's internal drive for a new one, then boot from the external drive and reverse clone your OS and files back onto the new drive in your PC. This cloned drive can be kept as a backup, or you can reverse clone from it to a new, blank drive. Unlike drive imaging, in which you create a compressed version of a drive that can be restored later, cloning creates an exact replica - boot records, files, settings and themes - that can be used immediately as a primary drive. Since imaging a drive can seemingly keep tidy records of your files and can be used to put Windows on a new drive, where does cloning come in? If you find that your computer has been infected with malware, for example, having a healthy image to restore to can make things quite easy when it comes to removing the virus. There doesn't need to be a complete failure, though, to benefit from an image backup.

#Hard drive image tools windows 10

Also, if you create a recovery environment on a separate USB stick or external hard drive, you can restore an image on a PC that doesn't have Windows 10 installed at all. In that case, you can choose your image (usually saved on an external drive) and restore your PC. If your Windows 10 PC suffers from a blue screen error and can't boot properly, you'll be confronted with a menu with an option to restore from a system image. There are a few ways you can recover your computer using a drive image.

#Hard drive image tools full

Incremental images are sometimes preferred because they can be created quickly depending on how many changes have been made, whereas differential images can become quite large depending on how much time has gone by since a full image was created. Incremental images record any changes made since the last incremental image, so, in the case of a restoration, you need the full image and every incremental image created thereafter.

Differential backups keep a record of any changes made since the full image was created, so restoring a system requires the full image and the latest differential image.

What's the difference between these types of image backups? A full image takes everything on the drive and is required to restore your system.