It’s never a bad idea to protect yourself with an extra copy of your hard drive. Why you should consider cloning your hard drive If you put a cloned drive into a computer, you’ll be able to start it up and use it normally. A cloned drive is exactly the same as its original.

Mac users can perform backups with Time Machine, and Windows also offers its own built-in backup utilities.Ĭloning copies everything. When you back up to an external hard drive or to the cloud, you’re creating duplicates of your files, but that backup cannot function as an independent drive on its own.

Just remember that cloning a drive and backing up your files are different:īackups copy only your files. What does cloning a drive mean?Ī cloned hard drive is an exact copy of the original, including the operating system and all the files it needs to boot up and run. Learn how to clone your hard drive on Windows computers and Macs with our step-by-step guide. You’ll want to clone your drive if you’re backing up valuable data, migrating to a shiny new computer, or upgrading to a solid-state drive (SSD). Cloning your hard drive creates a perfect one-to-one copy, fully bootable and exactly like the original.

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