The best disk cloning software makes it simple and easy to make a full copy of your hard drive, to serve as a backup. We've also featured the best free backup software. To restore your local disk from the backup you just made, simply follow the steps in this guide again, making sure to choose the local drive as your target disk instead of the cloned drive. Clonezilla now starts to collect information about the drive partitions. After the process is complete, Clonezilla will either prompt you to shut down or restart or do it automatically depending on the settings you chose in the previous step. The other options are simply to reboot or shutdown respectively once the copy process is complete.ġ0.

The first (default) option is to keep running and offer you the choice to reboot or shut down your machine. Clonezilla will next ask you what to do once the cloning process is complete. In simplest terms, these are a way to interactively check and repair the local file system before cloning.ĩ.

Once you've selected the target disk, you'll be asked to set extra parameters. If you only have one external drive connected, this will be the only option Clonezilla presents.Ĩ. Clonezilla will now ask you to choose the external drive into which the data will be cloned. The local disk you want to copy must be smaller in size than the external drive.ħ. At this stage, Clonezilla will ask you to choose you the disk you want to clone, which most likely is your internal hard disk. For those people unused to Linux naming conventions, these are done alphabetically, therefore your first hard drive is named 'sda', the second 'sdb' and so on. If you're uncertain you also may be able to confirm which is the correct drive by checking its capacity on the left hand side.

Choose the second option if you only want to copy one partition of the external hard drive to your list.Ħ. This is the simplest and easiest way to make an exact copy of your hard drive. The first option will create an exact copy of the hard drive including partitions such as the bootloader and any others you've previously defined. Next, Clonezilla will ask you to choose how you want to clone your disks. The 'Expert' mode allows you to define more advanced options such as running in text only mode, or cloning everything except the boot loader.ĥ. Next, you will be asked to define parameters. If you simply want to make a direct copy of a partition or drive then choose 'Beginner Mode'.

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