Just wanted to stop by and say thank you for all the years of excellent content. You have remained incredibly consistent and your way of explaining things is done in a manner most can easily understand.
"It's good to be going into Windows.... Well generally it isn't" - Great humor Chris and great timing on these videos as I need to do an upgrade. Thanks!!
16:00 Actually, if you look at the man page for dd, the synopsis says “convert and copy a file”. When it was being created, it couldn’t be called “cc”, because that name was already used for the C compiler. So the author used the next letter on, and called it “dd”. This has also (semi-facetiously) been interpreted to stand for “data destroyer”, in recognition of what can happen if you get certain parameters wrong ...
Very useful indeed. And thanks for including info on the Linux 'dd' command; I wasn't always clear on the caveats of using that one. Thanks for another great video. 🙂👍
This is excellent for anyone who needs to clone their existing drives. Most (if not all) of the top results on search engines are horrid nagware that I wouldn't want anywhere near my computers. Another great video for a Sunday afternoon. 👍
Yeah, I've seen exactly the same thing myself. I use Samsung drives on my computers so I've always used their excellent data migration tool, but it would be handy to use a cheaper brand of drive sometimes, and for that you can't use Samsung's software. The "solutions" you're likely to find by searching promise to be wonderful, but in fact won't help unless you hand over some money - more than it's worth to achieve a one-off cloning job.
@@BlobBlobkins I'm not indian so I'm not offended but DiskGenious is Chinese and they install "xi jin ping's alliance for china" checker on your computer. 🤣😂
Will I ever clone a hard drive in the next few years? Hopefully! And when I do, I'll certainly look back to this lovely video. Thanks as always, Chris! 😊
I can't remember ever posting in the comment section for this channel before. But I just love this channel. As you are trying to help and enlighten overs. Thank you.
Thanks again Chris!! I tested out DiskGenius on a virtual Windows 10 system (VirtualBox). I had a 100GB virtual system disk w/4 partitions and added a 256GB virtual blank disk. Now I know VirtualBox has tools to make a disk larger but just wanted to see how DiskGenius would work. The software cloned the disk in no time! I then shutdown the VM and removed the 100GB disk and added the 256GB disk, booted the VM and it worked like a charm! I think I will now get a larger SSD for my Windows 11 laptop and clone the sys disk. Way back when, this task was very complicated but this makes it a no brainer! Thanks Chris and stay well. Rich
Hummm, I wonder if it would work to "clone" a virtual system onto a physical disk to put into a bare metal system, possibly even the other way to virtualize a system. I know there's other programs specifically for that, but maybe it'd work....
I like CloneZilla. When my HDD started making noises, I was able to migrate everything to a SSD with no fuss. Clonezilla is a bit more nerdy to use, but gives the freedom to migrate and resize rather than having to install anything on Windows. I'm also wary of cloning a running system disk.
well, you are not supposed to clone a runnig system disk but the few times i used such tool doing that, it worked well, so seems to be ok if the tool knows what is doing it seems
Rescuezilla is the better option nowadays as that provides a GUI. That's why good cloning software will restart the computer and clone the system drive in a pre-boot environment, so it's not actually cloning a running system.
@@FlyboyHelosim Been using CloneZilla for years and the keyboard only UI brings back fond memories of Ghost and Partition Magic. Have to try out RescueZilla, thanks for the information. I have always clone from a live USB, the idea of cloning a running system just sounds wrong to me.
SystemRescue includes CloneZilla, and a bunch of other volume-management and diagnostic tools as well. At less than a gigabyte in size, it’s worth keeping a bootable stick with it handy.
Perfect!! I literally just decided to buy a new drive and clone my old one and “Hey presto!” the universe delivers unto me a video all about it from my favorite techno-teacher ♪(๑ᴖ◡ᴖ๑)♪
14:28 This is the beauty of Clonzilla: You can copy the command line displayed here and paste it next time you want to repeat the process without having to go through the menus all over again. Great for cloning a drive for back up purposes. Two other Free and Open Source alternative are Redo Rescue and Rescuezilla . Both use a GUI rather than a text based interface. Rescuezilla was forked from Redo Backup and Recovery in 2019 after a long period of inactivity since 2012. In 2020 the original project was resumed with the shorter name Redo Rescue icon Redo Rescue . Both are derived from Clonezilla and are fully compatible with Clonezilla disc images.
For past 2 months, I have been looking for cloning applications, but none were explained with much details as you did. Finally I hope I can do the cloning done this week itself. Thanks!!!
Keep in mind Clonezilla can clone to a drive of the same or larger size. However once you clone to a larger drive any clones of that drive will need to be that larger drive. You can't go backwards. I know I got burned by this when the drives were only differed by 1mb.
Can you believe it’s been so long since I’ve done this I needed to look it up. Should have known you’d be near the top of the search list. Thanks Chris.
YIKES. At the exact same moment you checked if your Disc Genius had worked I plugged in a drive to see if it would be a suitable target drive. The screen went blank and I saw the words "booting from disc" and I had heart failure wondering what the hell I had started 😱and then your soothing voice came over the airwaves and I realised what had happened. 😌
I never considered cloning a drive before. New laptops come with almost no memory these days, unless you are willing to pay silly money. This video is incredibly useful.
Fun fact: Clonezilla actually can clone/restore to a smaller (than source) destination drive, you simply HAVE TO select proportional partitions (k1) or else it will fail after the second final confirmation prompt as you pointed out. Not sure if it can when there are unknown/encrypted partitions though.
@@IIGrayfoxII iirc, Clonezilla can do that too but not in beginner mode; if not, I guess you still can manually in the terminal prompt with dd. In fact, that's how it handles encrypted partitions even in beginner mode. The issue is that raw copying makes impossible to resize the partition, let alone copying to a smaller destination drive. Besides, time isn't the only reason you may prefer a "smart" (filesystem-level) cloning.
Damn, I needed this last week! I was angry to find that most of them won't clone without buying the upgrade. I ended up reinstalling the OS from scratch, probably the best idea anyway. Thanks Chris.
I can understand your frustration, as so many packages allow you to set everything up, then won't execute the drive clone. Bad practice that in my view. If functionality is not included in a free version, it ought to be greyed-out.
Very useful information. Now I’ll have to check them out. Now the only question is, “Is it you or your clone reading this comment?” Looking forward to your next video!
Thanks for this video! I was having trouble getting Samsung's software to migrate the Windows C-drive to a new SSD, had tried and been totally disappointed by the free AOMEI program (where all it did was display ads for their paid products) - but found that DiskGenius worked perfectly! Thank you for pointing me to it! (My daughter thanks you too, it was her system I was upgrading)!
Have to admire the simplicity of the Samsung migration software, given how small the difference in drive costs are now it seems worth it for a Novice/first timer like me. Thank you for such a thorough and useful comparison vid/tutorial
I greatly appreciate videos like this. They save me a lot of time when I'm trying to tackle a problem, and this is EXACTLY one of the problems that vexed me recently. Thank you for such consistently informative content.
Excellent video. Your references to additional partitions is especially important with certain computer brands such as Lenovo which have numerous system portions.
I was wondering why I was unable to download it. Luckily I have it already installed on my PC so I just made a copy of the files and executables to use the program on a different PC.
Not much of an issue for people who know what they're doing. Just keep the installer file. I keep the installers for every piece of software I use, as you can't trust or rely on the internet.
Thanks. One important thing you didn’t mention is byte boundaries. Not including the boot partition, an SSD needs its partitions to start on multiples of 4096 bytes, otherwise it’ll run slower and not last as long. This can be a problem when cloning from a mechanical disk to an SSD, where the boundaries could be different. Under Windows, you can check that under System Information > Components > Storage > Disks. The Partition Starting Offset of an SSD needs to be exactly divisible by 4096 (with no remainder). Some cloning software will do that for you automatically, while others will not.
Cloned two SSD to NVME last year with Clonezilla, a system drive of 512GB to 1TB with 2 partitions, which above that it had to be converted from MBR to GPT for accomodating W11 from W8.1 (that part was dealt on another 512GB drive with support of an external W10 system), and a data drive of 4TB to 4TB. Checked all offsets and they're 4096 alligned, so my guess is that I've been lucky or Clonezilla does is automatically. The only thing I can complain about is that I now have two entries for Windows launch on the system BIOS/UEFI (probably due to the MBR->GPT transition), but I don't see any problems apart from that and the system works just fine. What I really don't understand is why Clonezilla takes 5 and DiskGenius 8 while Samsung takes 26 minutes for the cloning. Also, it would be good to see tools for resizing the partitions.
@@TheELASESINADOR Samsung is likely doing a sector analysis and checking data integrity. That's usually why a copy of any sort takes 3x as long. Also makes for an easy default way to identify a defective drive before it can piss off the customer. That's my guess, anyway. I use an antique (v5... 1997?) version of Norton to extract data from tired HDDs.... on an 8GB drive that had the creeping crud, it took three whole days... but it got ALL the data.
Samsung SSDs do their own optimization in firmware. This will make no difference to home users and contrary to what you seem to believe it will not degrade drive performance in any way noticeable to standard users. The OS is optimized for Tracks and Sectors and SSD lies to the OS constantly about how data is being manipulated to get around microsoft's draconian drive optimizations.
Absolutely brilliant Chris, thanks for making these videos, I've learned a heap of things. Having been involved in computers since the 80's, there is always new stuff that you can pick up from others! A good friend of mine wants me to clone an old IDE drive from his mini-computer that uses a VIA VB7001 Motherboard, I had no idea there were any of these left, but his radio gear only works with Windows XP. We'll see how this goes.
amaazing content, the clonezilla method worked very well, the ETA is very very accurate . First time i used it to clone 128GB to 1tb OS drive (had to disable secure boot) , second time cloned a half full 1tb hdd to a 2tb sata-iii ssd, took a long time but it worked good, only this time i had to resize the partiton by "adding" the unallocated space.
after many hours of trying to clone to a larger ssd and finding out most do charge you its only a free download . ive now got the job done migrating to the new disk , thank you very much sir very helpfull video thats twice now you have put me on the right track many thanks
I watched your video thinking that there is nothing I'm going to learn, but I'll support the channel as part of my Sunday morning ritual. Like you, I like to clone my Windows drives on my laptop and desktop so I have an instant roll back in case of a software or hardware error. I could clone the Linux ones too, but unlike Windows, there is not much to undo with a fresh Linux install and as you mentioned, the dd command can be used on an unmounted drive. Like others, I am gutted about losing Macrium. I am not sure whether it's worth $US80, which is close to $110 is worth it for quarterly backups, compared to less user-friendly free software. My data is backed up to the cloud, but the operating systems aren't. The desktop has seperate data and OS drives, but there is only one drive in the laptop. I would prefer not to back up old data when I back up my system. On the laptop, I should partition the OS drive to split system and data and I only need to clone the system drives. I didn't realide thst was possible before. Thanks again for the knowledge. It has been over 40 years since I got my first computer, a VIC-20, and I'm still learning.
Just did the Samsung updated Magician, picked the "Data Migration" option in the Left hand margin. Worked great on my new 990EVO 2TB upgrade. About 2hrs in total from a nearly full 1TB WD SSD. It did not even see or allow me to select more volumes on the boot drive, but they were recovery volumes. Apparently the Magician copies what it needs to and I see the recovery partitions on the new SSD. Thanks for a great painless tutorial! The last time I did clonezilla and it was a bit trickier.
For completeness sake, Balena Etcher also does offer disk cloning. I tested it with few sata ssds, worked well. Under Linux, you can copy partitions with gparted, save partitions to file with gnome disk utility. Copy only the c: partition allows to transfer Windows to disks already containing other OS, even windows. One has to make it bootable from windows setup stick or a second windows with bcdboot though. And you lose the recovery partition. I use that method since years.
Good video. This is one of those tasks that most people only need to do once in a blue moon. But when they need to do it, it’s not something you want to pay $75 to do. Free options are great to have.
Another very fine production! And timely for me, as my Clonezilla USB Live key was dead when I wanted it yesterday. With Many Thanks to you, I can now try to rebuild it it using Linux Mint.
Chris You are clear You are Accurate You give great tips (Use CD Drive cables for new SSD) You are without doubt the best presenter for computers on RUclips Thanks to you I have replaced my 12 year old hard drive for a brand new 1TB SSD I now boot up in 1 min 30 not 5 min 30 Applications open almost instantly I now have a "brand new" computer Thank you so much
Great video, as always - a delight. One thing though - pardon my aspergers but dd is not a Linux specific tool, though it is limited to UNIX and UNIX-like systems (which naturally includes both the Linux and BSD families). BTW - it can also be used for wiping disks.
I was rivited to this video! This one is being saved and bookmarked for my PC toolkit! Brilliant. I used Macrium a couple months ago, and now i have multiple alternatives! BLESS YOU Mr. Barnatt!
Greetings Chris B. Interesting tools you've displayed in action. Making drive cloning easier with simple tools like Samsung's would certainly encourage people/organisations to create proper backups saving them from WannaCrypt like attacks or even sudden drive failures. Amazing video as always. Cheers.
organisations use tape backup. Well they should. Most of the time though, getting the backup, loading it and running it takes too much time so these organisations pay.
@@IIGrayfoxII Most workstations in organizations are not backed up. Organizations will just reimage/ghost the machine from preconfigured master images. What generally gets targeted in organizations by ransomware are the workstations, not the servers...although attached network shares are impacted too. When you have 50,000 deployed machines suddenly infected with ransomware, the effort required to reimage all of the machines with a fresh image is basically an IT nightmare plus you lose institutional knowledge stored on those specific systems. Paying the ransom is not ideal but neither is losing a decade of work.
@@IIGrayfoxII "organisations use tape backup". Not anymore. There is too much data to use tape and it's too slow. One would have to keep changing the tapes, labeling them, organizing them, and rotating them. Some tapes one would want to keep forever, So there is the complication of storage and library organization. and, you would have to that for each computer in the company. Businesses now use cloud backup. It's faster, automatic (no human required), can keep several versions and delete old versions (again, automatically).
Thanks for very useful video Chris!!! As for me I am gonna use Macrium reflect as long as as it works. The end of life means the end of support for this application. Thus I hope that it will be fully operational for years ahead. But if not (for new versions of win11 for example) I am calm now after your video. Good luck!
Brilliant video. It's going to be Disk Genius for me - I have Acronis installed, it's brilliant for resorting a drive if there are issues or if some software causes problems, but to be honest it's a bit of a pain if restoring an existing image to a different size drive - this cloning is exactly what I've been looking for to upgrade my OS SSD to a larger one.
DD was a huge eye opener to me when I first got into Linux of how awesome open source is. It might seem funny to fixate on that considering just how awesome every part of your average Linux distro really is, but it baffled me why something so simple wasn't included by default on Windows.
A cynical person would say that it is because Microsoft wants you to buy a new Windows license instead of cloning the old drive. A non-cynical would say, yes that's strange.
It would not have been a good look for Steve Ballmer, already "part plonker" for being filmed skipping around a stage with sweaty armpits repeating the word "developers" over and over again, to have copied an application from Linux to Windows when he also called Linux a "cancer".
Linux distros also include bulk file-level copy tools, like rsync. I have upgraded the hard drives on my systems lots of times, and rsync did the job of moving my OS installations and all the rest of my files onto the new drives just fine. I just had to update my fstab and reinstall the bootloader to account for the changed volume IDs, and that was sufficient to make the new system bootable. Tip: there is a custom Linux distro tailored specifically for performing volume-management tasks, system diagnostics and so on: it’s called SystemRescue. It’s less than a gigabyte in size. Always worth keeping a bootable USB stick with it handy.
Shows how much most people really know… dd is just a very DUMB copier! It *usually* works, but certainly the slowest. Why? Cause it does not understand anything about the HD data, so it copies everything including EMPTY space! dd is for very specific situations, small copies, or no other tools available. Plenty free ones for basic needs. Windows actually just added a new backup program in W10 and W11, and their aim is for you to use them everywhere so they WILL be cloning your windows setup SOOOOOON!!!!
The free Samsung software to clone an existing Samsung drive to another Samsung drive is phenomenal, and I would have never know without this helpful video! Thank you!!
I clone my ssd boot drive and keep the old one for back up. I view that as the best backup due to you do not need the cloud or anything but a new drive to do that. Storing a M.2 does not take up a lot of space. I have 2 shelves of old 3.35 and 2.25 drives. I got a small box of M.2 drives.
Great video! I just used DiskGenius to clone a disk in my Alienware M16 R1 and went from 1 TB to 4 TB! Now my 1TB is my backup as a standalone SSD and my second M2 slot can be expanded to another 4TB drive!
Years ago I would use Ghost to create images for backups. It was command-line at the time, so I could setup a batch file that could be run from the system scheduler. Symantec came along and made the application use a GUI interface only that had to be installed, which ruined it for me. The old command line version worked up until Windows 7, though. It was so much easier to use and restore images than any purpose built backup applications, and it could be run from a floppy disk instead of needing to be installed.
Yep. I remember the old Ghost used in enterprise environments. Amazing to have a boot disk on a 1.44MB floppy just enough to load DOS, Ghost.exe and network drivers. Now I use CloneZilla which is alot faster to use.
Spent last evening migrating my OS using DiskGenius. Used the USB method, but when I took the working NVME and installed it as the main boot device inside the computer in the first NVME slot it never booted. I had two NVMW slots... so tried again migrating from the NVME in the first slot to the one in the second slot. That worked fine. (did have issues trying to boot into the BIOS long story but it worked out in the end.) For me this was a challenge but happy it worked out in the end. Thank you!
Dear Mr. Chris Im sorry for being out of RUclips for So long, primarly because I had to shuffle my jobs a bit in latest months. Although Just recently I decided to come back, and I've been granted a very helpful video I'm definetly trying out myself, because my netbook's HDD days are slowly coming to an end. I tried to use a few applications available online, but still encountered problems when transferring to SSD. I hope this would end my problems and I Will still be able to use my Windows 7 device. Thank you very much for the help. Have a great week!
Wow, this is exactly what I need to do. Woohoo! Now my c: drive can grow out of control safely and I can also move my d: drive over as well and expand that! Thank you so much my friend!
Excellent video. Thank you! It would seem that the next step might be to erase your old drive with the DOD standard or otherwise really good, drive erase program that makes recovery of your old files next to impossible. It would be nice to either cover that or reference a video or resource talking about that. If you can't repurpose your old drive you might want to sell it, but don't want anyone reading your first attempt at a historical fiction novel. I hope you had a very good weekend
I personally use Acronis TrueImage WD Edition. I've also recently discovered Rescuezilla, which is basically Clonezilla with a GUI... much more user-friendly for noobs than a command line.
dd can be great. I've written software (at work) for doing system backups with it. I write zeroes into the free space, take an LVM snapshot, and then dd off the disk images over the network. Works a treat.
DD can indeed be great, but not for cloning when upgrading a system drive to a larger disk. Like all tools, it is fit for certain purposes. This video is carefully titled to be about free drive cloning applications, not imaging. :)
For me, the one that works best is also the simplest: pv. Nobody ever mentions it, but it shines in its simplicity: "pv < /dev/sdx > /dev/sdy" for a drive-to-drive clone, or "pv < /dev/sdx > output.img" to an image.
@@wally6193 Sure. For example, cloning /dev/sda to /dev/sdb is as easy as: "pv < /dev/sda > /dev/sdb". But instead of cloning to another device, you can also convert it into an image file, like this: "pv < /dev/sda > outputfile.img". Works like a charm, really.
That's going to save a lot of peoples' arses when they have to do this. I recommend always including some data protection advice with these too such as independently backing up files, pictures, videos, etc. (stuff that can't be replaced) as an independent and specific step beforehand - and also creating a checksum of those files written to the backup medium with them and then checked in place on that backup medium to be assured the data is accurate and the medium is working properly. Adds a few extra steps that DO take time but it drops anxiety quiet a bit.
Graat video Chris. I love clonezilla. I use it to clone to an inage to upgrade my server raid drives. Also it has so many options to clone to, like network sources. SMb or over ssh. Thank you again.
_"Isn't it daft they have renamed Twitter?!"_ - 6:30 *Yes.* Yes it is! Because "X" is just soooo totally descriptive and "X" is not at all used anywhere else. 8-)
I've had this joke that I wanted to make for a long time about if/when X decides to start up a video portal buuuuuuut, well, this is a general audience channel. 😜😆
So if I need to search for a comment on Twitter, I would Google: _"X duck photos"._ That produced *zero* Twitter links. Where as _"twitter duck photos"_ produced lots of Twitter links. Yep, a brilliant idea. LOL.
@@Praxibetel-Ix - _"no no no... I said 'check the X video' not 'triple X video'!"_ Ya, nothing could go wrong there. Did you mean "buuuuuuuuut" or "butt"?! ;-)
Everybody is calling it “X, Formerly Known As Twitter” right now ... “XFKAT”. Musk is going to backtrack on this name change at some point, just you wait.
I have used a few different types of cloning software and the one you mention that's going away I liked the best. Almost all the drive company's use to have software for cloning but you had to have their name brand drive. I have to admit some of the ones you have mentioned I did not know existed. Thanks for another informative Video, everytime I look at your videos there is always something new to learn. The best Ed
a little less user friendly but qemu-img is a great tool if you need to convert raw drives into virtual hard drives for VMs and vice versa. Really useful tool if you mess around with drive imaging and virtual machines somewhat often
that is good info. I am looking to image my various system drives and put them on a storage server so I can restore them f anything goes wrong. having a whole pile of physical drives is a lot less elegant.
@@catriona_drummond That's exactly what I do with Clonezilla. I use Clonezilla device-to-image feature to create a drive image of my work and personal laptops and store them on my NAS via Samba or NFS every 3 months or so. Plus I use borgbackup to make daily backups of my personal files. So when disaster strikes, I can simply overwrite - or otherwise replace - the dead system drive with the latest disk image and then restore the latest daily backup available on borg. I can do a full restore of my system in about 2 hours and in fact I have done that lately, once to fix a borked upgrade on the work laptop - that has a complex partition scheme with multiple partitions some of them being LUKS encrypted - and twice to replace a dead SATA SSD on my personal laptop. Works like a charm.
As a sidenote for those that own some sort of WD or Crucial drive or SSD, those manufacturers still offer a special version of Acronis True Image for free; once the Rescue Media is made, it can stand alone as a very competent cloning/backup/restoration monster, to include being able to clone to smaller destination drives/SSDs without issue. (The WD or Crucial drive need only be installed or attached, it does not have to actually be involved in the cloning or backup operation as source or target)
Excellent video. I might have missed something, but I am confused when you say that no free version would clone the entire drive. It looked like it did in these demos. Does it only clone system files and no saved files or what? Thanks. These tools look really good compared to what I worked with in the 90's and early 2000's.
Sorry if I confused. I said that the free versions of Easeus and the other programs that I listed on the right in the graphic would not clone a drive. All the programs I showed do clone entire system drives. Cloning software has indeed improved a great deal. :)
_"DD will copy... empty space."_ - 16:42. So DD would write empty data (sectors) and actually waste an SSD's write TBW life??? Not good. So only use it with HDDs that don't have a TBW life to worry about.
@@ExplainingComputers - Thanks for the confirmation. DD is like old cloning programs that could copy your NTFS (new at the time) disks but didn't know what they were copying and just did a sector to sector copy.
Definitively CloneZilla my best choice ! By the way, sometimes, got some problems with the -k1 option (resizing) and preferring doing it with the native OS. VERY good video ! Once again thanks for your work !
Not too long ago, I replaced the two spinner data drives on my main pc with a couple of 2.5" SSDs. The new ones were from Silicon Power, and each one came with a link to NTI Echo to clone the drives. It worked, but not all shortcuts worked properly after cloning. I would be careful of that program, and possibly others.
very well made video - summarises exactly and not over blows the information - keep up the good work. I keep coming back whenever I need a re-fresh or to learn about new tech as I'm no longer actively working with hardware and this channel provides exactly the right amount of info in the right amount of capacity (1GB, not 1TB 😉)
Every since i got into the IT industry as a tech, i have always had problems with using Drive cloning software. First, it's sometimes a real pain to get into a clients BIOS to make configuration changes with secure boot so you can boot off the necessary software. And worst of all, 75% of the time, for reasons i don't understand, when i install the completed cloned SSD it won't boot. I've tried switching the original and cloned drives to different bays but the problem constantly persists. So much so that i just invested in a hardware cloning machine so i can just remove the original drive, plug it into a separate machine with the new SSD and just push a button. I realize that you can't go from a larger original drive to a smaller drive but i don't care. Most people who want to upgrade to a SSD want to go larger in size anyhow.
The most common issue with cloned drives not booting, in my experience, are a) copying the OS volume but not the UEFI volume (I recently had issues making VHDs for the same reason. A particular Hyper-V server was hosting a bunch of VMs that were hiding this volume for some reason) and b) trying to clone an old MBR drive into a new system that's motherboard does not support CSM.
@@ragingbombast It's probably more your reason (b) trying to clone an old MBR drive into a new system that's motherboard does not support CSM. Either way when i do the clone offline on my machine, it ALWAYS works. So I'm done with cloning software period. Not worth the time invested to get these issues always popping up.
@@wally6193 Any hardware cloning machine will work. Just look for one that has built in OFFLINE cloning abilities. Thats the key because all you are doing is plugging two drives into the machine and pushing a button. Clone done.
Great advice - I follow the same strategy to be ready to swap and continue working if a drive dies. The level of detail was spot on for the tool comparisons - thank you for your meticulous work.
Great Chris. I added a 2nd Linux drive thanks to your earlier video, then added a NVMe drive via the PCIe slot (thanks to your video again!) and now am about to update my Macbook with an NVMe drive, so this video arrived just in time. Thanks! Much better than ChatGPT!!
Do all the applications take about the same time to do a clone? For me, the best thing about Macrium is how nippy it is. I've tried other applications that were painfully slow in comparison; but that was a while ago so things may have gotten better in that regard.
Speed varies as you note. Here both DiskGenius and Clonezilla are nice and fast. The Samsung software is slower. Linux DD is extremely slow, as it copies empty space too.
I am going to make the last minute of this video my Bible, and follow it religiously for the rest of my life. I just recovered from a devastating loss of 3 years of my data because my laptop felt it needed to reconfirm earth's gravity and sent my HDD to hell in the process. Never again. Amazing videos Mr Barnatt.
This is another strange case where 1 piece of software used to have pretty much 100% of the market ( Symantec ghost) and nowadays the once market leader has completely disappeared. Ghost was very very good, it could even boot from floppy, resize partitions etc.
It was bought by Symantec/Norton which is the kiss of death for software. They rolled it into their Enterprise Management Suite and discontinued all consumer versions.
This video is just what I needed at the moment as I want to migrate a new windows 11 system drive to a bigger ssd. I've never used clonezilla before so thanks for showing us how it works. It was also very interesting to see the other software in use. I just got a little Trigkey mini pc and want to try it with an external gpu. It has the Ryzen 7 5800H cpu so I'm hoping it will be a capable little machine. I want to try it with windows and linux to see what suits my needs better. Should be interesting at least. Thanks for another splendid video Chris!
I use Clonezilla at present but find I cannot use it with my usual 4K screen although the interface is normal and readable with lower resolution monitors. Anyone else have this issue?
I've brought so much life into older family laptops by simply copying everything from the older HDD to a new SSD. Thanks, Clonezilla! Bonus: I can often dump the disk image ISO across the network to my NAS if needed later.
The only 'free' that matters is free/libre software, i.e. freedom/liberty-respecting software w/ full source code access to the ends of total transparency & end-user control. In this respect, only 10:36 _Clonezilla Live_ (originally developed by Steven Shiau of the NCHC Free Software Labs, Taiwan) as well as 15:49 _GNU dd_ (originally developed by Richard M. Stallman of the Free Software Foundation, U.S.A.) count as truly free. When these exist, there's no good reason to use proprietary equivalents.
The Samsung app was ideal for a migration I did following your excellent video. Do note if you are using it with a Samsung SSD, it does not work if you put it in a USB housing as it does not recognise it as a Samsung drive, just a USB drive. I put it into the second SSD port on my PC to get it to work.
Chris you seem to be missing the thumbnails and links (subscribe and your other channel) at the end of the video. I just see the arrows pointing down to nothing. At least when I watched. Oops! :-)
Just wanted to stop by and say thank you for all the years of excellent content. You have remained incredibly consistent and your way of explaining things is done in a manner most can easily understand.
Thanks, appreciated. :)
11:39 - Ventoy is fantastic for booting from ISOs. No 'burning' to flash drives needed .. simply store on a USB stick. Very convenient.
"It's good to be going into Windows.... Well generally it isn't" - Great humor Chris and great timing on these videos as I need to do an upgrade. Thanks!!
it is great if the window is open or you are not going too fast
16:00 Actually, if you look at the man page for dd, the synopsis says “convert and copy a file”. When it was being created, it couldn’t be called “cc”, because that name was already used for the C compiler. So the author used the next letter on, and called it “dd”.
This has also (semi-facetiously) been interpreted to stand for “data destroyer”, in recognition of what can happen if you get certain parameters wrong ...
Almost known as Direct Dump or Direct Dustbin by my students when i was teaching my lesson "first look to Linux Systems" 🤣
It's amazing how many times you happen to produce videos of what i either currently need, or have just used! As always, excellent content, sir! ❤
Thanks Leslie. :)
@@ExplainingComputers I've noticed the same. I want a video on your mind-reading software. :)
I hear your video to improve my knowledge and my english. 😊
Very useful indeed. And thanks for including info on the Linux 'dd' command; I wasn't always clear on the caveats of using that one. Thanks for another great video. 🙂👍
Little sad to see people can’t Google or figure out themselves.
This is excellent for anyone who needs to clone their existing drives. Most (if not all) of the top results on search engines are horrid nagware that I wouldn't want anywhere near my computers. Another great video for a Sunday afternoon. 👍
Yeah, I've seen exactly the same thing myself. I use Samsung drives on my computers so I've always used their excellent data migration tool, but it would be handy to use a cheaper brand of drive sometimes, and for that you can't use Samsung's software.
The "solutions" you're likely to find by searching promise to be wonderful, but in fact won't help unless you hand over some money - more than it's worth to achieve a one-off cloning job.
Have people forgot about clonezilla?
Indians are RUclips watchers, ready to help you with free software in every video
unless your a paki @@BlobBlobkins
@@BlobBlobkins I'm not indian so I'm not offended but DiskGenious is Chinese and they install "xi jin ping's alliance for china" checker on your computer. 🤣😂
Will I ever clone a hard drive in the next few years? Hopefully! And when I do, I'll certainly look back to this lovely video. Thanks as always, Chris! 😊
Thanks for your support!
@@ExplainingComputers You're welcome! 😁
Just downloaded Disk Genius - what a fabulous piece of free software. Resizing and combining partitions as we speak. Thanks for the tip :)
Thank you for your comment. This may be the most helpful one. Can the other programs like clonezilla and rescuezilla also do this?
Straight forward, clear and to the point. What more could one ask for. Brilliant as ever.
Thanks. :)
I can't remember ever posting in the comment section for this channel before.
But I just love this channel. As you are trying to help and enlighten overs. Thank you.
Thanks for your kind feedback, appreciated. :)
Thanks again Chris!! I tested out DiskGenius on a virtual Windows 10 system (VirtualBox). I had a 100GB virtual system disk w/4 partitions and added a 256GB virtual blank disk. Now I know VirtualBox has tools to make a disk larger but just wanted to see how DiskGenius would work. The software cloned the disk in no time! I then shutdown the VM and removed the 100GB disk and added the 256GB disk, booted the VM and it worked like a charm! I think I will now get a larger SSD for my Windows 11 laptop and clone the sys disk. Way back when, this task was very complicated but this makes it a no brainer! Thanks Chris and stay well. Rich
I like your testing. :) Cloning software has indeed improved significantly.
@@ExplainingComputers Thanks!!
Hummm, I wonder if it would work to "clone" a virtual system onto a physical disk to put into a bare metal system, possibly even the other way to virtualize a system. I know there's other programs specifically for that, but maybe it'd work....
I like CloneZilla. When my HDD started making noises, I was able to migrate everything to a SSD with no fuss. Clonezilla is a bit more nerdy to use, but gives the freedom to migrate and resize rather than having to install anything on Windows. I'm also wary of cloning a running system disk.
well, you are not supposed to clone a runnig system disk but the few times i used such tool doing that, it worked well, so seems to be ok if the tool knows what is doing it seems
Rescuezilla is the better option nowadays as that provides a GUI. That's why good cloning software will restart the computer and clone the system drive in a pre-boot environment, so it's not actually cloning a running system.
@@FlyboyHelosim Been using CloneZilla for years and the keyboard only UI brings back fond memories of Ghost and Partition Magic. Have to try out RescueZilla, thanks for the information. I have always clone from a live USB, the idea of cloning a running system just sounds wrong to me.
SystemRescue includes CloneZilla, and a bunch of other volume-management and diagnostic tools as well. At less than a gigabyte in size, it’s worth keeping a bootable stick with it handy.
Clonezilla: A Bit More Nerdy
dd: Hold My Beer!
Perfect!! I literally just decided to buy a new drive and clone my old one and “Hey presto!” the universe delivers unto me a video all about it from my favorite techno-teacher ♪(๑ᴖ◡ᴖ๑)♪
Spooky! :)
14:28 This is the beauty of Clonzilla: You can copy the command line displayed here and paste it next time you want to repeat the process without having to go through the menus all over again. Great for cloning a drive for back up purposes.
Two other Free and Open Source alternative are Redo Rescue and Rescuezilla . Both use a GUI rather than a text based interface.
Rescuezilla was forked from Redo Backup and Recovery in 2019 after a long period of inactivity since 2012. In 2020 the original project was resumed with the shorter name Redo Rescue icon Redo Rescue .
Both are derived from Clonezilla and are fully compatible with Clonezilla disc images.
Rescuezilla is great as it includes other tools such as gParted. Makes it more fully featured.
Rescuezilla is my goto now.
@@dingokidneys
For past 2 months, I have been looking for cloning applications, but none were explained with much details as you did. Finally I hope I can do the cloning done this week itself. Thanks!!!
Good luck with your cloning!
Keep in mind Clonezilla can clone to a drive of the same or larger size. However once you clone to a larger
drive any clones of that drive will need to be that larger drive. You can't go backwards. I know I got burned
by this when the drives were only differed by 1mb.
I just cloned my HD to a Samsung SSD and it couldn't have been any easier. Thanks for the upload. You have another subscriber.
Welcome aboard! And enjoy your upgraded computer performance. :)
Can you believe it’s been so long since I’ve done this I needed to look it up.
Should have known you’d be near the top of the search list.
Thanks Chris.
YIKES. At the exact same moment you checked if your Disc Genius had worked I plugged in a drive to see if it would be a suitable target drive. The screen went blank and I saw the words "booting from disc" and I had heart failure wondering what the hell I had started 😱and then your soothing voice came over the airwaves and I realised what had happened. 😌
I never considered cloning a drive before. New laptops come with almost no memory these days, unless you are willing to pay silly money. This video is incredibly useful.
2PM Sunday is certainly the best time of the week! Always learn something new :)
it is if you are in the right place
for me in seoul it is 10pm
@@happy_apple its 2PM in the UK where explainingcomputers is from
@@happy_appleIn Brazil it's 10 A.M.
11pm here in eastern Australia, although from next week it'll be midnight because of daylight savings.
Fun fact: Clonezilla actually can clone/restore to a smaller (than source) destination drive, you simply HAVE TO select proportional partitions (k1) or else it will fail after the second final confirmation prompt as you pointed out. Not sure if it can when there are unknown/encrypted partitions though.
A good clone tool will just do a sector by sector copy which will make a 1:1 copy.
Encryption wont matter.
@@IIGrayfoxII iirc, Clonezilla can do that too but not in beginner mode; if not, I guess you still can manually in the terminal prompt with dd. In fact, that's how it handles encrypted partitions even in beginner mode.
The issue is that raw copying makes impossible to resize the partition, let alone copying to a smaller destination drive. Besides, time isn't the only reason you may prefer a "smart" (filesystem-level) cloning.
Damn, I needed this last week! I was angry to find that most of them won't clone without buying the upgrade. I ended up reinstalling the OS from scratch, probably the best idea anyway. Thanks Chris.
I can understand your frustration, as so many packages allow you to set everything up, then won't execute the drive clone. Bad practice that in my view. If functionality is not included in a free version, it ought to be greyed-out.
💯 agree Chris.. exactly what just happened to me with Maceium and AOMNI
you really deserve millions of subscribers
YES.
Very useful information. Now I’ll have to check them out. Now the only question is, “Is it you or your clone reading this comment?” Looking forward to your next video!
Thanks for this video! I was having trouble getting Samsung's software to migrate the Windows C-drive to a new SSD, had tried and been totally disappointed by the free AOMEI program (where all it did was display ads for their paid products) - but found that DiskGenius worked perfectly! Thank you for pointing me to it! (My daughter thanks you too, it was her system I was upgrading)!
I went thru all this more than a year ago, but the info was well needed. good job!!
Have to admire the simplicity of the Samsung migration software, given how small the difference in drive costs are now it seems worth it for a Novice/first timer like me.
Thank you for such a thorough and useful comparison vid/tutorial
I greatly appreciate videos like this. They save me a lot of time when I'm trying to tackle a problem, and this is EXACTLY one of the problems that vexed me recently. Thank you for such consistently informative content.
Excellent video. Your references to additional partitions is especially important with certain computer brands such as Lenovo which have numerous system portions.
Macrium Reflect Free going away is a tragedy. Great little piece of software.
I was wondering why I was unable to download it. Luckily I have it already installed on my PC so I just made a copy of the files and executables to use the program on a different PC.
I'm keeping last two versions of installer :)
Same. I already have it installed on my laptop. So I'm keeping the most recent version of the installer.
Yep, it going away is a bummer.
Not much of an issue for people who know what they're doing. Just keep the installer file. I keep the installers for every piece of software I use, as you can't trust or rely on the internet.
Thanks. One important thing you didn’t mention is byte boundaries. Not including the boot partition, an SSD needs its partitions to start on multiples of 4096 bytes, otherwise it’ll run slower and not last as long. This can be a problem when cloning from a mechanical disk to an SSD, where the boundaries could be different. Under Windows, you can check that under System Information > Components > Storage > Disks. The Partition Starting Offset of an SSD needs to be exactly divisible by 4096 (with no remainder). Some cloning software will do that for you automatically, while others will not.
Cloned two SSD to NVME last year with Clonezilla, a system drive of 512GB to 1TB with 2 partitions, which above that it had to be converted from MBR to GPT for accomodating W11 from W8.1 (that part was dealt on another 512GB drive with support of an external W10 system), and a data drive of 4TB to 4TB. Checked all offsets and they're 4096 alligned, so my guess is that I've been lucky or Clonezilla does is automatically.
The only thing I can complain about is that I now have two entries for Windows launch on the system BIOS/UEFI (probably due to the MBR->GPT transition), but I don't see any problems apart from that and the system works just fine.
What I really don't understand is why Clonezilla takes 5 and DiskGenius 8 while Samsung takes 26 minutes for the cloning. Also, it would be good to see tools for resizing the partitions.
@@TheELASESINADOR Samsung is likely doing a sector analysis and checking data integrity. That's usually why a copy of any sort takes 3x as long. Also makes for an easy default way to identify a defective drive before it can piss off the customer. That's my guess, anyway.
I use an antique (v5... 1997?) version of Norton to extract data from tired HDDs.... on an 8GB drive that had the creeping crud, it took three whole days... but it got ALL the data.
How would I go about making sure of this, if I were to use DiskGenius?
okay, so which software does it automatically, can you tell us, tks.
Samsung SSDs do their own optimization in firmware. This will make no difference to home users and contrary to what you seem to believe it will not degrade drive performance in any way noticeable to standard users. The OS is optimized for Tracks and Sectors and SSD lies to the OS constantly about how data is being manipulated to get around microsoft's draconian drive optimizations.
Absolutely brilliant Chris, thanks for making these videos, I've learned a heap of things.
Having been involved in computers since the 80's, there is always new stuff that you can pick up from others!
A good friend of mine wants me to clone an old IDE drive from his mini-computer that uses a VIA VB7001 Motherboard, I had no idea there were any of these left, but his radio gear only works with Windows XP.
We'll see how this goes.
Good luck! :)
amaazing content, the clonezilla method worked very well, the ETA is very very accurate . First time i used it to clone 128GB to 1tb OS drive (had to disable secure boot) , second time cloned a half full 1tb hdd to a 2tb sata-iii ssd, took a long time but it worked good, only this time i had to resize the partiton by "adding" the unallocated space.
We use clonezilla at work, for everything, image cloning, disk cloning, hdd to ssd migrations, etc. We boot it from network using pxe boot + ipxe.
after many hours of trying to clone to a larger ssd and finding out most do charge you its only a free download . ive now got the job done migrating to the new disk , thank you very much sir very helpfull video thats twice now you have put me on the right track many thanks
I watched your video thinking that there is nothing I'm going to learn, but I'll support the channel as part of my Sunday morning ritual. Like you, I like to clone my Windows drives on my laptop and desktop so I have an instant roll back in case of a software or hardware error. I could clone the Linux ones too, but unlike Windows, there is not much to undo with a fresh Linux install and as you mentioned, the dd command can be used on an unmounted drive. Like others, I am gutted about losing Macrium. I am not sure whether it's worth $US80, which is close to $110 is worth it for quarterly backups, compared to less user-friendly free software.
My data is backed up to the cloud, but the operating systems aren't. The desktop has seperate data and OS drives, but there is only one drive in the laptop. I would prefer not to back up old data when I back up my system. On the laptop, I should partition the OS drive to split system and data and I only need to clone the system drives. I didn't realide thst was possible before.
Thanks again for the knowledge. It has been over 40 years since I got my first computer, a VIC-20, and I'm still learning.
Just did the Samsung updated Magician, picked the "Data Migration" option in the Left hand margin. Worked great on my new 990EVO 2TB upgrade. About 2hrs in total from a nearly full 1TB WD SSD. It did not even see or allow me to select more volumes on the boot drive, but they were recovery volumes. Apparently the Magician copies what it needs to and I see the recovery partitions on the new SSD. Thanks for a great painless tutorial! The last time I did clonezilla and it was a bit trickier.
For completeness sake, Balena Etcher also does offer disk cloning. I tested it with few sata ssds, worked well. Under Linux, you can copy partitions with gparted, save partitions to file with gnome disk utility. Copy only the c: partition allows to transfer Windows to disks already containing other OS, even windows. One has to make it bootable from windows setup stick or a second windows with bcdboot though. And you lose the recovery partition. I use that method since years.
Wow, I never realized that Etcher could do that. I mainly just use it for writing images to flash drives.
Good video. This is one of those tasks that most people only need to do once in a blue moon. But when they need to do it, it’s not something you want to pay $75 to do. Free options are great to have.
Great Video! For dd you probably want to add conv=sync,noerror so you do not rely on every single block being readable.
And don't forget to add ' bs=1M ' to dd, it will speed things up by using a larger blocksize!
Another very fine production! And timely for me, as my Clonezilla USB Live key was dead when I wanted it yesterday. With Many Thanks to you, I can now try to rebuild it it using Linux Mint.
Thank you for this video! Exactly what i was looking for after a recent hard disk failure. Backup and running again! ;)
`dd` stands for "convert and copy." `cc` was already taken by the C compiler, so they simply incremented the letters for a short name.
Thanks for this. I've only ever found it referred to as "data duplicator". We live and learn :)
I thought it was "disk duplicator" instead. @@ExplainingComputers
@@ExplainingComputers Not disk destroyer then?
The command just does what you tell it. The destroyer is the user. @@blueconcretezebra
@@ExplainingComputers When I was a UNIX administrator, we called it "data dump".
Chris You are clear You are Accurate You give great tips (Use CD Drive cables for new SSD) You are without doubt the best presenter for computers on RUclips Thanks to you I have replaced my 12 year old hard drive for a brand new 1TB SSD I now boot up in 1 min 30 not 5 min 30 Applications open almost instantly I now have a "brand new" computer Thank you so much
Thanks for this feedback, and it is great to hear of your positive result. Nothing beats an HDD to SSD upgrade. Transformative! :)
Having restarted a few times it now boots up in 1 minute Woooooooppee@@ExplainingComputers
Great video, as always - a delight.
One thing though - pardon my aspergers but dd is not a Linux specific tool, though it is limited to UNIX and UNIX-like systems (which naturally includes both the Linux and BSD families). BTW - it can also be used for wiping disks.
And reading tape.
I was rivited to this video! This one is being saved and bookmarked for my PC toolkit! Brilliant. I used Macrium a couple months ago, and now i have multiple alternatives! BLESS YOU Mr. Barnatt!
Greetings Chris B.
Interesting tools you've displayed in action. Making drive cloning easier with simple tools like Samsung's would certainly encourage people/organisations to create proper backups saving them from WannaCrypt like attacks or even sudden drive failures.
Amazing video as always. Cheers.
organisations use tape backup.
Well they should.
Most of the time though, getting the backup, loading it and running it takes too much time so these organisations pay.
@@IIGrayfoxII Most workstations in organizations are not backed up. Organizations will just reimage/ghost the machine from preconfigured master images. What generally gets targeted in organizations by ransomware are the workstations, not the servers...although attached network shares are impacted too. When you have 50,000 deployed machines suddenly infected with ransomware, the effort required to reimage all of the machines with a fresh image is basically an IT nightmare plus you lose institutional knowledge stored on those specific systems. Paying the ransom is not ideal but neither is losing a decade of work.
@@IIGrayfoxII "organisations use tape backup". Not anymore. There is too much data to use tape and it's too slow. One would have to keep changing the tapes, labeling them, organizing them, and rotating them. Some tapes one would want to keep forever, So there is the complication of storage and library organization. and, you would have to that for each computer in the company. Businesses now use cloud backup. It's faster, automatic (no human required), can keep several versions and delete old versions (again, automatically).
Thanks for very useful video Chris!!! As for me I am gonna use Macrium reflect as long as as it works. The end of life means the end of support for this application. Thus I hope that it will be fully operational for years ahead. But if not (for new versions of win11 for example) I am calm now after your video. Good luck!
I think that a lot of people will try to keep Macrium running. As you say, it should be fine until major Windows changes.
I used Macrium last weekl and it was fine but I have installed Disk Genius just in case
I really liked Macrium, too bad it's no longer available.
Thanks for your support. It is very sad about Macrium Reflect Free.
I found your channel and really enjoy everything that you have posted so far. Thanks for sharing these very informative videos with us!
Great video as always! Very sad and unfortunate to learn that Macrium reflext is no longer a thing, it was my go to cloning solution.
Brilliant video. It's going to be Disk Genius for me - I have Acronis installed, it's brilliant for resorting a drive if there are issues or if some software causes problems, but to be honest it's a bit of a pain if restoring an existing image to a different size drive - this cloning is exactly what I've been looking for to upgrade my OS SSD to a larger one.
DD was a huge eye opener to me when I first got into Linux of how awesome open source is. It might seem funny to fixate on that considering just how awesome every part of your average Linux distro really is, but it baffled me why something so simple wasn't included by default on Windows.
A cynical person would say that it is because Microsoft wants you to buy a new Windows license instead of cloning the old drive.
A non-cynical would say, yes that's strange.
It would not have been a good look for Steve Ballmer, already "part plonker" for being filmed skipping around a stage with sweaty armpits repeating the word "developers" over and over again, to have copied an application from Linux to Windows when he also called Linux a "cancer".
It is somewhat curious. Microsoft has a pretty decent machine to virtual machine utility, why not a machine to machine one?
Linux distros also include bulk file-level copy tools, like rsync. I have upgraded the hard drives on my systems lots of times, and rsync did the job of moving my OS installations and all the rest of my files onto the new drives just fine. I just had to update my fstab and reinstall the bootloader to account for the changed volume IDs, and that was sufficient to make the new system bootable.
Tip: there is a custom Linux distro tailored specifically for performing volume-management tasks, system diagnostics and so on: it’s called SystemRescue. It’s less than a gigabyte in size. Always worth keeping a bootable USB stick with it handy.
Shows how much most people really know…
dd is just a very DUMB copier!
It *usually* works, but certainly the slowest.
Why? Cause it does not understand anything about the HD data, so it copies everything including EMPTY space!
dd is for very specific situations, small copies, or no other tools available.
Plenty free ones for basic needs.
Windows actually just added a new backup program in W10 and W11, and their aim is for you to use them everywhere so they WILL be cloning your windows setup SOOOOOON!!!!
you've got a talent to explain complicated things in a simple manner, great video. thanks for your work.
Another well presented, straight to the point and very informative video. This channel is excellent, thanks again mate.
The free Samsung software to clone an existing Samsung drive to another Samsung drive is phenomenal, and I would have never know without this helpful video! Thank you!!
I clone my ssd boot drive and keep the old one for back up. I view that as the best backup due to you do not need the cloud or anything but a new drive to do that. Storing a M.2 does not take up a lot of space. I have 2 shelves of old 3.35 and 2.25 drives. I got a small box of M.2 drives.
I do the same. :)
Great video! I just used DiskGenius to clone a disk in my Alienware M16 R1 and went from 1 TB to 4 TB! Now my 1TB is my backup as a standalone SSD and my second M2 slot can be expanded to another 4TB drive!
Sounds like you are sorted! :)
Years ago I would use Ghost to create images for backups. It was command-line at the time, so I could setup a batch file that could be run from the system scheduler. Symantec came along and made the application use a GUI interface only that had to be installed, which ruined it for me. The old command line version worked up until Windows 7, though. It was so much easier to use and restore images than any purpose built backup applications, and it could be run from a floppy disk instead of needing to be installed.
Yep. I remember the old Ghost used in enterprise environments. Amazing to have a boot disk on a 1.44MB floppy just enough to load DOS, Ghost.exe and network drivers. Now I use CloneZilla which is alot faster to use.
Spent last evening migrating my OS using DiskGenius. Used the USB method, but when I took the working NVME and installed it as the main boot device inside the computer in the first NVME slot it never booted.
I had two NVMW slots... so tried again migrating from the NVME in the first slot to the one in the second slot.
That worked fine.
(did have issues trying to boot into the BIOS long story but it worked out in the end.) For me this was a challenge but happy it worked out in the end.
Thank you!
Thanks for mentioning the limitations of dd.
Somebody had to! :)
Thanks for all your good work. J
Thanks for your support. :)
Dear Mr. Chris
Im sorry for being out of RUclips for So long, primarly because I had to shuffle my jobs a bit in latest months.
Although Just recently I decided to come back, and I've been granted a very helpful video I'm definetly trying out myself, because my netbook's HDD days are slowly coming to an end. I tried to use a few applications available online, but still encountered problems when transferring to SSD. I hope this would end my problems and I Will still be able to use my Windows 7 device.
Thank you very much for the help.
Have a great week!
Glad you back! :)
Wow, this is exactly what I need to do. Woohoo! Now my c: drive can grow out of control safely and I can also move my d: drive over as well and expand that! Thank you so much my friend!
Excellent video. Thank you! It would seem that the next step might be to erase your old drive with the DOD standard or otherwise really good, drive erase program that makes recovery of your old files next to impossible. It would be nice to either cover that or reference a video or resource talking about that. If you can't repurpose your old drive you might want to sell it, but don't want anyone reading your first attempt at a historical fiction novel. I hope you had a very good weekend
I personally use Acronis TrueImage WD Edition. I've also recently discovered Rescuezilla, which is basically Clonezilla with a GUI... much more user-friendly for noobs than a command line.
dd can be great. I've written software (at work) for doing system backups with it. I write zeroes into the free space, take an LVM snapshot, and then dd off the disk images over the network. Works a treat.
DD can indeed be great, but not for cloning when upgrading a system drive to a larger disk. Like all tools, it is fit for certain purposes. This video is carefully titled to be about free drive cloning applications, not imaging. :)
For me, the one that works best is also the simplest: pv. Nobody ever mentions it, but it shines in its simplicity: "pv < /dev/sdx > /dev/sdy" for a drive-to-drive clone, or "pv < /dev/sdx > output.img" to an image.
could you expand a little bit more on the code you're using in the cmd window, thanks.
@@wally6193 Sure. For example, cloning /dev/sda to /dev/sdb is as easy as: "pv < /dev/sda > /dev/sdb". But instead of cloning to another device, you can also convert it into an image file, like this: "pv < /dev/sda > outputfile.img". Works like a charm, really.
@@ne0ne0 interesting, wonder why he didn't mention that method. Thanks.
is already close to a million subscribers.
That's going to save a lot of peoples' arses when they have to do this. I recommend always including some data protection advice with these too such as independently backing up files, pictures, videos, etc. (stuff that can't be replaced) as an independent and specific step beforehand - and also creating a checksum of those files written to the backup medium with them and then checked in place on that backup medium to be assured the data is accurate and the medium is working properly. Adds a few extra steps that DO take time but it drops anxiety quiet a bit.
Thanks Chris. Since I got 1TB hard drive I would like to cloning my 250GB Hard drive :)
i understand
chris does make a lot of videos
Graat video Chris. I love clonezilla. I use it to clone to an inage to upgrade my server raid drives. Also it has so many options to clone to, like network sources. SMb or over ssh. Thank you again.
_"Isn't it daft they have renamed Twitter?!"_ - 6:30 *Yes.* Yes it is! Because "X" is just soooo totally descriptive and "X" is not at all used anywhere else. 8-)
I've had this joke that I wanted to make for a long time about if/when X decides to start up a video portal buuuuuuut, well, this is a general audience channel. 😜😆
So if I need to search for a comment on Twitter, I would Google: _"X duck photos"._ That produced *zero* Twitter links. Where as _"twitter duck photos"_ produced lots of Twitter links.
Yep, a brilliant idea. LOL.
@@Praxibetel-Ix - _"no no no... I said 'check the X video' not 'triple X video'!"_ Ya, nothing could go wrong there.
Did you mean "buuuuuuuuut" or "butt"?! ;-)
@@ElmerFuddGun "Buuuuuut". 😅
Everybody is calling it “X, Formerly Known As Twitter” right now ... “XFKAT”.
Musk is going to backtrack on this name change at some point, just you wait.
I have used a few different types of cloning software and the one you mention that's going away I liked the best. Almost all the drive company's use to have software for cloning but you had to have their name brand drive. I have to admit some of the ones you have mentioned I did not know existed. Thanks for another informative Video, everytime I look at your videos there is always something new to learn. The best Ed
a little less user friendly but qemu-img is a great tool if you need to convert raw drives into virtual hard drives for VMs and vice versa. Really useful tool if you mess around with drive imaging and virtual machines somewhat often
that is good info. I am looking to image my various system drives and put them on a storage server so I can restore them f anything goes wrong. having a whole pile of physical drives is a lot less elegant.
@@catriona_drummond That's exactly what I do with Clonezilla. I use Clonezilla device-to-image feature to create a drive image of my work and personal laptops and store them on my NAS via Samba or NFS every 3 months or so. Plus I use borgbackup to make daily backups of my personal files. So when disaster strikes, I can simply overwrite - or otherwise replace - the dead system drive with the latest disk image and then restore the latest daily backup available on borg. I can do a full restore of my system in about 2 hours and in fact I have done that lately, once to fix a borked upgrade on the work laptop - that has a complex partition scheme with multiple partitions some of them being LUKS encrypted - and twice to replace a dead SATA SSD on my personal laptop. Works like a charm.
As a sidenote for those that own some sort of WD or Crucial drive or SSD, those manufacturers still offer a special version of Acronis True Image for free; once the Rescue Media is made, it can stand alone as a very competent cloning/backup/restoration monster, to include being able to clone to smaller destination drives/SSDs without issue. (The WD or Crucial drive need only be installed or attached, it does not have to actually be involved in the cloning or backup operation as source or target)
Excellent video. I might have missed something, but I am confused when you say that no free version would clone the entire drive. It looked like it did in these demos. Does it only clone system files and no saved files or what? Thanks. These tools look really good compared to what I worked with in the 90's and early 2000's.
Sorry if I confused. I said that the free versions of Easeus and the other programs that I listed on the right in the graphic would not clone a drive. All the programs I showed do clone entire system drives. Cloning software has indeed improved a great deal. :)
@@ExplainingComputers Thanks.
I clone my system SSD once a week as part of my backup strategy. This has saved my bacon many times over the years.
I use clonezilla, somehow seems better to run from a usb independent from the os. I can see how some people would be put off by the interface though.
OMG, thank you so much! Every other video told me to use those exact 3 softwares that were “free”.
_"DD will copy... empty space."_ - 16:42. So DD would write empty data (sectors) and actually waste an SSD's write TBW life??? Not good. So only use it with HDDs that don't have a TBW life to worry about.
What you say is correct.
@@ExplainingComputers - Thanks for the confirmation. DD is like old cloning programs that could copy your NTFS (new at the time) disks but didn't know what they were copying and just did a sector to sector copy.
Definitively CloneZilla my best choice ! By the way, sometimes, got some problems with the -k1 option (resizing) and preferring doing it with the native OS. VERY good video ! Once again thanks for your work !
Not too long ago, I replaced the two spinner data drives on my main pc with a couple of 2.5" SSDs. The new ones were from Silicon Power, and each one came with a link to NTI Echo to clone the drives. It worked, but not all shortcuts worked properly after cloning. I would be careful of that program, and possibly others.
very well made video - summarises exactly and not over blows the information - keep up the good work. I keep coming back whenever I need a re-fresh or to learn about new tech as I'm no longer actively working with hardware and this channel provides exactly the right amount of info in the right amount of capacity (1GB, not 1TB 😉)
Every since i got into the IT industry as a tech, i have always had problems with using Drive cloning software. First, it's sometimes a real pain to get into a clients BIOS to make configuration changes with secure boot so you can boot off the necessary software. And worst of all, 75% of the time, for reasons i don't understand, when i install the completed cloned SSD it won't boot. I've tried switching the original and cloned drives to different bays but the problem constantly persists. So much so that i just invested in a hardware cloning machine so i can just remove the original drive, plug it into a separate machine with the new SSD and just push a button. I realize that you can't go from a larger original drive to a smaller drive but i don't care. Most people who want to upgrade to a SSD want to go larger in size anyhow.
The most common issue with cloned drives not booting, in my experience, are a) copying the OS volume but not the UEFI volume (I recently had issues making VHDs for the same reason. A particular Hyper-V server was hosting a bunch of VMs that were hiding this volume for some reason) and b) trying to clone an old MBR drive into a new system that's motherboard does not support CSM.
@@ragingbombast It's probably more your reason (b) trying to clone an old MBR drive into a new system that's motherboard does not support CSM. Either way when i do the clone offline on my machine, it ALWAYS works. So I'm done with cloning software period. Not worth the time invested to get these issues always popping up.
I would like to know which machine are you using
@@wally6193 Any hardware cloning machine will work. Just look for one that has built in OFFLINE cloning abilities. Thats the key because all you are doing is plugging two drives into the machine and pushing a button. Clone done.
@@klwthe3rd great thanks
Great advice - I follow the same strategy to be ready to swap and continue working if a drive dies. The level of detail was spot on for the tool comparisons - thank you for your meticulous work.
💖💖💖 Very Wel Explained - THANKS for Sharing 🙏🙏🙏
Great Chris. I added a 2nd Linux drive thanks to your earlier video, then added a NVMe drive via the PCIe slot (thanks to your video again!) and now am about to update my Macbook with an NVMe drive, so this video arrived just in time. Thanks! Much better than ChatGPT!!
Do all the applications take about the same time to do a clone?
For me, the best thing about Macrium is how nippy it is. I've tried other applications that were painfully slow in comparison; but that was a while ago so things may have gotten better in that regard.
Speed varies as you note. Here both DiskGenius and Clonezilla are nice and fast. The Samsung software is slower. Linux DD is extremely slow, as it copies empty space too.
I am going to make the last minute of this video my Bible, and follow it religiously for the rest of my life. I just recovered from a devastating loss of 3 years of my data because my laptop felt it needed to reconfirm earth's gravity and sent my HDD to hell in the process. Never again. Amazing videos Mr Barnatt.
Good luck with your new policy! :)
Balena tetchy will also clone drives on a good day with the wind behind it.
Very nicely put!
Your channel is incredible. Thank you for putting all your content and knowledge up for free for all of us to use!
Thanks for watching. :)
This is another strange case where 1 piece of software used to have pretty much 100% of the market ( Symantec ghost) and nowadays the once market leader has completely disappeared. Ghost was very very good, it could even boot from floppy, resize partitions etc.
It was bought by Symantec/Norton which is the kiss of death for software. They rolled it into their Enterprise Management Suite and discontinued all consumer versions.
This video is just what I needed at the moment as I want to migrate a new windows 11 system drive to a bigger ssd. I've never used clonezilla before so thanks for showing us how it works. It was also very interesting to see the other software in use. I just got a little Trigkey mini pc and want to try it with an external gpu. It has the Ryzen 7 5800H cpu so I'm hoping it will be a capable little machine. I want to try it with windows and linux to see what suits my needs better. Should be interesting at least. Thanks for another splendid video Chris!
Good luck with your projects. :)
I use Clonezilla at present but find I cannot use it with my usual 4K screen although the interface is normal and readable with lower resolution monitors. Anyone else have this issue?
I've brought so much life into older family laptops by simply copying everything from the older HDD to a new SSD. Thanks, Clonezilla!
Bonus: I can often dump the disk image ISO across the network to my NAS if needed later.
The only 'free' that matters is free/libre software, i.e. freedom/liberty-respecting software w/ full source code access to the ends of total transparency & end-user control. In this respect, only 10:36 _Clonezilla Live_ (originally developed by Steven Shiau of the NCHC Free Software Labs, Taiwan) as well as 15:49 _GNU dd_ (originally developed by Richard M. Stallman of the Free Software Foundation, U.S.A.) count as truly free. When these exist, there's no good reason to use proprietary equivalents.
The Samsung app was ideal for a migration I did following your excellent video. Do note if you are using it with a Samsung SSD, it does not work if you put it in a USB housing as it does not recognise it as a Samsung drive, just a USB drive. I put it into the second SSD port on my PC to get it to work.
I find this very strange. I have used the Samsung software to clone to an SSD connected via USB adapter many times, including in this video. :)
Chris you seem to be missing the thumbnails and links (subscribe and your other channel) at the end of the video. I just see the arrows pointing down to nothing. At least when I watched. Oops! :-)
Wow, thanks! :) I have fixed that now. Oops indeed!
@@ExplainingComputers - I try to help out when I can. ;-)