Advice Needed Disk Cloning s/w?

[jeallen01]

Good afternoon.

After last week's disaster when trying to clone the HDD in my main laptop to a Samsung EVO850 with the s/w that came with that SSD ( and now having to recover the OS on HDD from "as delivered" scratch status in 2012, via 7 Home Premium and then the Anytime upgrade to 7 Ultimate ), I want to try to clone the rebuilt disk again - but hopefully not using the supplied Samsung s/w.

Therefore, I would much appreciate some recommendations (no Linux solutions if at all avoidable, please) for some both "easy" to use and reliable s/w as I don't want to have to rebuild the OS again - don't even mind paying some "reasonable" money if that the best solution!

Thanks in advance.

John

 

[archive10]

I sucessfully made a backup image of a HDD to a NAS some months ago.
I used some open source software (clonezilla) booting off a CD-ROM, then copying the entire partition to an NFS-mounted drive.
I could then swap HDDs in the machine, and restore.
The tool also supported USB HDDs etc. - It was just very convenient to use the NAS as it had mucho storage.

If you want, I can check tonight if I can find the tool and the instructions.

BUT, it is a linux image with gnu tools.
If you don't want Linux, there are other (commercial) tools; but most require registration, payments, installation on host disk etc to work.
The Gnu thing is invisible to the source HDD.
I like that.

 

[4wd]

Zero doubt....Macrium Reflect, free for home use and coming with all the 'pro' possibilities.

imo, don't use cloning, use imaging. Image the hidden boot partition + C in one image, and make other image(s) for your file partition(s) (if you use partitions, if not, highly recommend).

Make the Win PE boot usb stick, test that your pc boots with it. With it you can boot the pc, access external \ internal disks, and choose which image to restore. A 10 minutes job to get back to business from any kind of problem, disaster, ...or failed late night experiment :O)

Spend a little time getting used to the process. Reflect is solid as a rock (...only problems could be backup HD crash, stolen, overwritten etc, I keep backup images on several different HDs).

Keep a few backups from different periods, one never knows what may be needed. And backup images can be mounted as 'virtual' HD, individual files can be copied \ retrieved from that.

After a fresh OS install and after all the hours to make everything looking and working good, make an image of that, so next time one does a OS refresh, it's a 5 minutes job.

 

[archive10]

Zero doubt....Macrium Reflect, free for home use and coming with all the 'pro' possibilities.

imo, don't use cloning, use imaging. Image the hidden boot partition + C in one image, and make other image(s) for your file partition(s) (if you use partitions, if not, highly recommend).

Make the Win PE boot usb stick, test that your pc boots with it. With it you can boot the pc, access external \ internal disks, and choose which image to restore. A 10 minutes job to get back to business from any kind of problem.

Spend a little time getting used to the process. Reflect is solid as a rock (...only problems could be backup HD crash, stolen, overwritten etc, I keep backup images on several different HDs).

Keep a few backups from different periods, one never knows what may be needed. And backup images can be mounted as 'virtual' HD, individual files can be copied \ retrieved from that.

After a fresh OS install and after all the hours to make everything looking and working good, make an image of that, so next time one does a OS refresh, it's a 5 minutes job.

Yeah, I looked at that - but for some reason chose not to go down that route.
Can't remember exactly why - possibly because the clonezilla supported NFS mounting or similar.
But good to hear some positive feedback on the use of it. Sounds ok.

 

[4wd]

^^^ 10 years + of use, must have done some hundreds (not joking) restores, never failed. Apart from keeping a small pc-harem of my own, upgrading \ swapping HD's and SSD's, am doing maintenance for some companies + PC-stupid friends who regularly manage to end up with the most unbelieveable of troubles :O) (wiping things, virus, ransomware etc)

And yes, did not mention it in post above, regular imaging is a super fix \ solution for virus and ransom attack.

Just my opinions (opinions that works and saves the day, that is :O)

 

[jeallen01]

Thanks guys

Will consider all that, and more. My only reservation (Linux apart) so far relates to Macreum - based on having a look at it sometime last year and then reading the comparative reviews here of that & 4 other packages - is that (to me!) it seems rather more complicated to understand and use than my brain is likely to cope with easily in the short term (not joking: my short term memory has never been good, and it's getting a lot poorer as I get older; so remembering "where to go and what to do" within s/w menus is becoming even more difficult at times until I've had a lot of practice, and unfortunately I still often forget after a few days )

 

[4wd]

^^^ agree that's it's not a 'one click' in the very beginning, needs a little time to get the overview and figure out one's needs (after all it's a complete pro program), for basic imaging one only needs to learn and master the basics (and forget all the rest until backup needs evolve), it will work perfect to avoid all potential future pc nightmares (like the one you just experienced, ain't that worth a few hours of learning time ?).

Once put to use it will quickly settle down to your defaults (and you can also save different setups), and becomes a 'few quick clicks' job, backups set and started in a few seconds, go for a cup of tea and return to see the finished backup file safe and sound on your external hd, and enjoy peace of mind :O)

There may be simpler (scaled down, more basic) programs out there, but if reliability is primordial with no screams and tears the day one really needed it to work, I recommend Macrium.

 

[jeallen01]

Update:
I had another go with the supplied Samsung s/w and finally managed to clone the recreated boot drive on the old hard disk to the new SSD - so I won't be experimenting with other s/w for the moment (too much else on my plate).

However, I now think that a lot of the problems I had in the early stages were actually due to the Zalman dual-disk USB 3 dock I was using most of the time, because it now seems to be very, very hit and miss in being recognised by the laptop. Luckily I also have another 1-bay USB dock and that does not seem to suffer the same problem (and there were also issues with the laptop USB 3 ports having been misidentified by the newly rebuilt OS.

Anyway, thanks for all the suggestions - I definitely will follow up on those in the near future.