The best disk cloning software is one of the best ways to make a replica or a 'clone' of a hard drive.
There are a few reasons you might want to do this, like creating a backup or distributing a drive configuration to multiple people. Our team of experts has spent hundreds of hours testing all of the best disk cloning software, particularly looking at price, ease of use, and cloning speed and any customisations that are available, as well as any extra features like ransomware protection.
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Best disk cloning software overall
Ease Todo is a great disk cloning program which offers lots of impressive features - even with the free tier.
Disk cloning covers a whole range of cloning activities, like system cloning, hard drive cloning, and partition cloning. there's been an range of modes like incremental, scheduled, and full backups.
It also comes with a Home tier which gives you email notifications, file exclusion, and offsite copies. This does Outlook backup and recovery, and it's available for a single user license for a year or two-year license. There's a lifetime license options available for a single device.
For business users, there is the top option of the Workstation tier. This is on top of all these features; a license which covet business usage, command line backup, and central management via the Backup Center.
It's not very reliable to link out (browsing the product page for a bit should do that though) - but it won't save you money with repeat purchases, it's at a price point where you can try out the software and see if it works for you.
The pricing starts at $39.95 for a one-year license, with extra options to add cloud storage on top, or even pay a one-time fee for lifetime upgrades
Read our full EaseUs Todo Backup review.
Best disk cloning software for ransomware protection
Acronis True Image (formerly Cyber Protect Home Office) offers a full backup solution with a range of cyber and data protection features.
This helps with active disk imaging for Mac and Windows OS' alongside world-class backup and cloning, as well as cyberprotection tools ransomware protection, quick recovery, and full image to file level backups.
This software is particularly affective as it sends data to both a local drive and a cloud solution. It can also carry out cloning and mirror imaging duties for your setup's system drive, in just two easy clicks.
The ransomware prevention tools will keep your data safe from an evermore present type of threat. However, the downside is that this uses up a fair bit of system resources.
It starts at $49.99 for a one-year subscription. For cloud-backups, you'll need to upgrade to the Advanced plan. A Premium plan offers 5TB of storage and electronic signatures. Each plan allows licensing for up to 5 computers.
Read our full Acronis True Image review.
Best disk cloning software for home and business
Macrium Reflect supports the essential task of direct disk cloning. The free tier features support for restoration of non-booting systems, scheduling backups with flexible templates, and creating live images of a running Windows OS. Notably, unlike most other free licenses, the Free edition is licensed for home and business use.
While there is a free 30-day trial to provide a basic service, paid upgrades are required for continued access to a maintained version of the software that also packs in more features, starting from around $55 / £50 / AUD$80.
The Home tier adds the option to encrypt backups, create incremental backups and has ransomware protection.
The Workstation tier has the additional features of logging events in Windows, and central management using Macrium Site Manager, with volume discounts available.
Both of these versions have a one-time purchase option, but only come with a year of product support before an additional fee must be paid to renew that part of the deal.
That's perhaps manageable (though not ideal) at the Home price point, but as soon as you get into purchasing Workstation or even Server plans, the prices get just a bit eyewatering (up into the hundreds or even over a thousand dollars per year), and we don't appreciate companies adding additional charges on top of what's already a sizable investment.
Make the most of that trial, in our opinion.
Read our full Macrium Reflect review.
Best professional-grade disk cloning software
Paragon Hard Disk Manager covers the full range of disk duties, including disk cloning of the entire drive, and advanced activities such as cloning by the partition, and can even resize the partition while copying it, or copy a hard drive to another with a dissimilar sector size.
It can also create a virtual clone of your PC to a USB drive, that can then run portably from another PC, or creating recovery media to be able to boot a non bootable PC with the included Recovery Media Builder.
Pricing comes in the form of a one-time fee from around $90 / £80 / AUD$145. It's a hefty price, perhaps, but any one-off purchase stands to save you money over time if you use the product enough.
Our only concern is that, for business use, a separate product is offered for $99, and the licence is only valid for one computer.
Read our full Paragon Hard Disk Manager review.
Best no-cost disk cloning software
AOMEI Backupper is a disk cloning utility that's free to download and use. A key feature of the software is the ability to clone a large disk to a smaller SSD drive.
Sectors and partitions are copied over, along with key files such as boot.ini, NTLDR, BCD, winload.exe and MBR. There's also an intelligent cloning option, which only copies over used space on the harddrive.
The whole process means that you end up with a full copy of your harddrive and won't need to reinstall Windows when copying your clone over to a new harddrive. Although the software is Freeware, there's no adware bundled with the software. Instead, there's a paid-for version available for a single PC license.
However, do note that the free standard edition only supports a data disk clone. To clone a disk including a Windows system, the disk style (GPT/MBR) of the source disk and the destination disk must be the same.
Pricing starts from around $40 / £40 / AUD$120 for a one-year license, with additional price points for added cloud storage, a lifetime licence, and server capacity.
Read our full AOMEI Backupper review.
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How to choose the right disk cloning software for your needs
Which disk cloning software is best for you?
When you're deciding which disk cloning software to deploy, make sure you determine how difficult it might be to backup and recover.
For example, not all will clone multiple partitions at the same time. Additionally, free or budget software options may have built-in limitations on how much data or how many files you can actually clone.
What's the difference between cloning and a backup?
What's the difference between cloning and a backup?
Backups and cloning serve different purposes. Disk cloning is for speed and rapid replacement - for an identical drive to swap in if the original copy fails, whereas backups are primarily for data preservation and recovery, where you save different versions over time.
If you need a fully functional second hard drive instantly, disk cloning is a good choice. It's not the most efficient storage solution, because the copy isn't compressed, so is at least as large as the original - whereas a backup typically compresses the files.
How we tested the best
How we tested the best disk cloning software
To test out the best disk cloning software, we set up an account with the relevant software platform - either as a download or as an online service.
Then, we test the service to see how the software is used for cloning data from external hard drives and normal hardware.
The aim was to push each software platform to see how useful its basic tools were and how intuitive more advanced tools were.
