Best Hard Drive Cloning Software

What is Hard Drive Cloning Software?

What are the Common Features of Hard Drive Cloning Software?

What are the Benefits of Hard Drive Cloning Software?

Who Uses Hard Drive Cloning Software?

Computer users: Since this software is not complicated to use, most users can create their cloned hardware online, on the same computer, or another external hard drive. They can use it as a backup solution or for replicating their setting on a new computer

IT administrators: Hard drive cloning is exceptionally beneficial for IT administrators in a medium to large size organization. They can set up new computers or servers in groups without a manual setup for each device.

Software Related to Hard Drive Cloning Software

Related solutions that can be used together with hard drive cloning software include:

Disaster recovery software: Disaster recovery (DR) solutions help businesses quickly and efficiently recover software, settings, and data to an as-before state in the event of computer, server, or other infrastructure failure. Hard drive imaging can be a part of disaster recovery solutions as it can completely restore the user devices from system to file level. 

Server backup software: Server backup software is used to ensure the information stored or processed through server hardware remains intact in case of mechanical failure or user error. Server backup tools differ from other backup technology in that they communicate directly with the server and operate solely to store its information. So while users can use hard drive cloning for server backup, it is not recommended as hard drive cloning isn’t automatic and designed for server backup. 

Challenges with Hard Drive Cloning Software

Software solutions can come with their own set of challenges. 

Software licensing: Software licensing is an important consideration when cloning. While hard drive cloning allows users to clone all file information—including licenses—from one drive to another, some software might look for the hard drive’s unique serial number as an identifier for validating the software license. This is highly suspicious to software vendors and may cause a software audit. Users should reach out to IT admin or software providers before cloning their hardware into multiple devices.

Hardware risk: A cloned hard drive connected to the same source drive is susceptible to malware. If the virus infects the original hardware, it is also likely that the cloned hardware is infected, as well. Outside of virus attacks, hard drives can also be damaged by a power surge or hardware failure. Lastly, unwanted guests can steal or vandalize the internal and external drives stored nearby. To prevent these hardware failures, users should consider storing their cloned image files securely online. 

Incomplete backup solution: Hard drive cloning isn’t a good standalone backup solution because it doesn’t support incremental backup and differential backup. These backup features allow users to backtrack previous versions of backup. If the current backup version is infected by a virus, users can use the backup’s previous version. Without these features, users can’t restore their device to a time before the most recent backup. This is important because if there is a virus when the hard drive is cloned, the virus will be copied to the clone drive. Therefore, users should consider the cloned drive to be a way of avoiding downtime, not a standalone backup solution.

How to Buy Hard Drive Cloning Software

Requirements Gathering (RFI/RFP) for Hard Drive Cloning Software

Whether a company is looking for its first hard drive cloning software tool or looking to replace an existing one, g2.com can help find the best disk cloning software or disk imaging software.

Hard drive cloning software often comes with specifically desired features and capabilities. To start, companies should first think about their core requirements. They should think about the number of physical and digital resources that will be cloned, storage location (cloud services or physical hard drive storing backups), applications that will clone the data, and constraints related to budgeting, staffing, or continued maintenance. Industries involving large amounts of sensitive data should also factor compliance and security needs into their proposal as well. Also, many companies already have other backup solutions, so these companies can first ask if their current vendor offers hard drive cloning as part of their backup solutions.

Prioritizing the desired feature set that meets the requirement can help narrow down the potential pool of hard drive cloning solutions, allowing teams to then apply further considerations for budget, ease of administration, security requirements, and more. This holistic approach empowers buyers to move forward with a focused checklist, which can be used in conjunction with G2 scoring to select the best hard drive cloning product for the business.

Compare Hard Drive Cloning Software Products

Create a long list

Requirements gathering for hard drive cloning solutions is fairly straightforward, but can still vary greatly depending on the scope of capability. From the bottom of the list, there are open-source cloning software and original OS cloning software. They are usually free but have limited features and may require complex tutorials to use. On the other hand, there are expensive hard drive cloning solutions that offer additional features such as security scans, online image backups, good user interfaces, and so on. Some of these solutions may offer free versions, too. There are many options so companies need to prepare their list of requirements to get through the long list quickly. Since budget and staffing will largely dictate what products end up on the shortlist, a vendor’s ability to meet each of the company’s requirements and budget will make it to the short list.

Create a short list

From the long list of vendors, it is helpful to narrow down the list of vendors to come up with a shorter list of contenders, preferably no more than three to five. With this list in hand, businesses can produce a matrix to compare the features and pricing of the various solutions.

Conduct demos

To ensure a fair comparison, the user should demo each solution on the shortlist with the same use case and datasets. This will allow the business to evaluate like-for-like and see how each vendor stacks up against the competition. 

Selection of Hard Drive Cloning Software

Choose a selection team

To choose a selection team, decision makers need to involve subject matter experts from all teams that will use the system. This primarily involves product managers, developers, IT, and security staff. Purchasing team can also help with negotiation.

Negotiation

Using the requirements prioritization, users can organize the data to help people understand how each solution meets their requirements. This can prevent siloed thinking and serve as a catalyst for internal debates and bring new questions for the vendor. Every product will have pros and cons, but the selection analysis should paint a clearer picture of each product’s ability to meet the company’s unique needs. The identified cons can then be used to either eliminate options from the shortlist or serve as leverage for discounts and other offers.

Final decision

After this stage, it is important to perform a trial run if possible with a small selection of IT professionals. This will help to ensure that the software of choice integrates well with the company’s hardware setup. If the hard drive cloning tool is well liked and well utilized, the buyer can take that as a sign that their selection is the right one. If not, reevaluation of the options may be necessary.