Cloning your Hard Drive and Saving Every Bit of Data

They cloned a sheep once, and that sheep had every thing similar to its clone source, except of course it's memories. With your hard drive on the other hand, you can copy its memory, every last bit of it, and restore it on a completely different hard drive.

Cloning your hard drive is something that a person needs to do or at least wants to do, once in their life. The fact is hard drives go bad sometimes, and other times people plain old just want to get a new one with more storage capacity. Either way, wouldn't it be nice to be able to get a new hard drive and make it have the exact same data as your old one, so you could pick up right where you left off?

Think about it, that means you wouldn't have to reinstall your operating system, put all of your important data on it, or even set all of those pesky little preferences back to the way you want it. They would already be done, because you just made a clone of your old hard drive, and all data will be exactly the same. So how can you accomplish this?

The best way to clone your hard drive, and easiest, is to use a good hard drive imaging software. If you plan to use cloning software, all you have to do is insert the disk, follow its instructions and then it will start the cloning process. You may be wondering where you save your data image too. Well believe it or not, you can actually save it on the hard drive that you just made the image from, but of course if more then half is being used by data, it will not fit.

Your other option then is to store it on a DVD, if it can fit, or the hard drive you actually plan on copying it to. That is what you want anyways right? The reason that is not the best option though, is because you would have to open up your computer and attach it to the same IDE cable that you current hard drive is attached to.

Then you would have to partition and format the new drive, and then and only then, you could start the immediate transfer of data from one hard drive to another.

Long process huh? Thought so, but don't worry, you still have some other options. You could also use RAID technology, which stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. RAID basically works like this; you have two hard drives in your computer and they both are at least the same size and are attached to the same IDE cable. Then, whenever data is written to your main hard drive, it is also written to your backup one.

This means that you would have an always, up to date hard drive clone at all times. So if anything should happen, you can just boot from your other hard drive, and presto, you're in like Flynn.

On a final note, you need to understand that RAID won't help if you have a fire, tornado or some other disaster that might destroy your entire computer. For this reason, I don't really recommend anybody uses RAID, but instead do a backup weekly and store it on some kind of external storage device.

External storage devices can range from zip drives, DVD-R's, external hard drives, and anything else that can store large amounts of data, but not be in your computer. If you do that, and store the external data in a safe place, then you will forever be safe guarded against virus attacks, disasters, and anything else that might come your computers way.