DriveClone

If you had a brand new hard disk, you would be inclined to install a fresh operating system on it and copy all important data from the old hard drive. If you have too many files, applications and drives on your old hard drive, it will take a long time to copy everything and the transfer may not be successful. With DriveClone, you can send everything on your old hard drive, including the operating system and its settings, to your new device. It creates a perfect replicate of your entire file system, so you would feel like you never changed your hard drive.

You don't have to pay for DriveClone if you intend to use it for non-commercial purposes. The application can be downloaded and installed in no time. Additionally, meeting its system requirements should not be a challenge. It works on Windows XP, Vista, Win 7 and Win 8 and you can run it on any mid-range computer.

The main user interface presents a series of options for performing various different operations. The main feature is the possibility of cloning entire hard disks, Solid State Drives (SSD) or individual partitions. All you have to do is select the source and destination devices or partitions, in separate tree structures and click a button to start the cloning process. You should be careful, because the application will format the destination drive automatically.

Besides copying the contents of one hard drive to another, you can also perform an incremental cloning, to mirror all contents and protect them in case of hardware failures. Furthermore, the software is capable of converting hard drives to a VMware or Hyper-v virtual file.

Of course, you can copy everything from one hard drive to another in Windows Explorer, but you can do more with DriveClone. If you tick a few options, on a small settings menu, the application will clone your hard drive, but it will exclude useless data, like temp files, to save space. The software can also perform a dissimilar boot cloning process, which gives you the possibility of booting the cloned drive on other computers, with different hardware components. If you wish to increase the cloned drive's performance, you can also set the program to defragment all files before starting the cloning process.