How to clone a hard drive?

I want to make a back up of my hard drive so if she dies I can just plug in my clone and be up and running again. Could anyone direct me toward a guide/software/or service to do this? Thanks guys.

Just a few apps that may prove fruitful.


[url=http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/]EASEUS[/url]

[url=http://www.xxclone.com/index.htm]XXCLONE[/url]

[url=http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm]Driveimage XML[/url]

[url=http://ping.windowsdream.com/]PING or Partimage Is Not Ghost[/url]


XXClone looks pretty easy to use, while I think PING would be more my forte.


I haven't used any of them.. I previously had machines with mirrored disks or RAID5, and the only time I was moving all my data, was when I upgraded to a bigger badder set of drives.

hmm i think RAID1 may interest you it mirrors ur main drive so ur constantly backed up in realtime, if one of them fails u can replace the failed drive and the new one will get rebuild quickly, however the drive must be identical in size to maximize efficiency if ur main drive is smaller than the backup(mirror) drive then the backup drive will get reduced to the main drive's size, also RAID1 will "Slightly" degrade the read performance but writing performance will improve.

I would love to set up raid but I am investing as little $ into this pc as possible and I have some drives laying around. My goal is to get it to last another 2 years so I really just need a backup drive.

you can clone the partition with Robocopy in cmd

If you are using windows vista or 7:


right click on my computer > manage

Under storage sidebar > click disk management


Right click on the drive you want to copy, and select clone, or some option like that, i'm on my XP machine atm. I will clarify as soon as I get on my win 7 machine.

I'll be on steam in a few and i'll show you then.

Nate said:

If you are using windows vista or 7:


right click on my computer > manage

Under storage sidebar > click disk management


Right click on the drive you want to copy, and select clone, or some option like that, i'm on my XP machine atm. I will clarify as soon as I get on my win 7 machine.

I am running visa. that sounds straight to the point Nate. I did not think windows let you create a duplicate of its self.