Windows Drive Cloning Software

[dsavitsk]

Does anyone have a suggestion for good software (free or otherwise) for cloning a more than half empty 1T windows drive to a smaller (512GM) drive, including the boot stuff, recovery partition, etc?

[kevin gilmore]

norton ghost or whatever its called these days.

[Looser101]

Macrium Reflect Free

[spritzer]

If you are using a Samsung drive they have their own utility which is excellent for this stuff. 

[HiWire]

A bit late to the question, but I had good experiences with the former Acronis True Image, now (vaguely) renamed Acronis Cyber Protect.

They have an example of their compression rates: https://kb.acronis.com/content/16791

However, the latest PC Magazine review of the software was kind of lukewarm, so maybe they're not as reliable as before.

You can also use Windows' built in File History application to manage disk image backups: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-create-full-backup-your-windows-11-pc

Edited May 31, 2022 by HiWire

[jamesmking]

3 hours ago, HiWire said:

A bit late to the question, but I had good experiences with the former Acronis True Image, now (vaguely) renamed Acronis Cyber Protect.

They have an example of their compression rates: https://kb.acronis.com/content/16791

However, the latest PC Magazine review of the software was kind of lukewarm, so maybe they're not as reliable as before.

You can also use Windows' built in File History application to manage disk image backups: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-create-full-backup-your-windows-11-pc

I used to be a long time user of acronis true image more than ten years... I even was on their beta test program for a number of years. In my opinion acronis got worse and worse after about 2015/6 as a product and a company - I believe they got bough out by a venture capital company. Basic things were either removed or did not work e.g.  you do differential backups. There was no way to delete a differentials from inside the program and if you deleted one from outside the program the index files messed up and you could literally get hundreds of error message popups one after another all saying could not find file x. The tech support in the forums basically stopped replying to peoples complaints - I must have complained for about 4 ot 5 years before they put deleting differentials back into their software. Then acronis decided to start offering yearly licenses automatically renewing and added pay per year per GB cloud and anti virus into a backup program rather than fix the backup program they had, then they decided to go pay per year rent only NOT even allowing existing users with permanent licenses to buy more licenses for the software they already had full licenses for. At tis point I jumped ship to macrium reflect just as Acronis did a product rebranding exercise rather than fix the things people where complaining about... Their backup software did not even allow you to select your own drivers from your own windows install so if you had fancy network cards, host bus adapters etc your recovery image had no support so you could not recover. There was no bit locker support so if you had bit locker encrypted drives you could not read them from their recovery medium.. it took an acronis forum member to write scripts to inject drivers and bit locker support to make the recovery medium actually useful to recover with because acronis could not be bothered to do it themselves.. In my opinion without the forum contributed scripts acronis would have been abandoned long before their product lost focus and became pay per year only.

In  my personal experience acronis lost the plot... just look at the stream of complaints in their support forum...

macrium reflect on the other hand allows you to select drivers from your existing windows when you build recovery media, allows deletion of differentials and the recovery medium supports bit locker out of the box and is still buy once own forever.. They also dont seem to bring out a new version every year with lots of useless features.

 

Edited May 31, 2022 by jamesmking

[HiWire]

I'd go with Macrium Reflect, then.

I hesitated for years about buying the Acronis subscription... looks like things went badly sideways after I had to use their product.

[jamesmking]

8 hours ago, HiWire said:

I'd go with Macrium Reflect, then.

I hesitated for years about buying the Acronis subscription... looks like things went badly sideways after I had to use their product.

The user interface on macrium is not as intuitive or as pretty as acronis, and I cant cmopare the tech support because I never needed marcium support. My general feeling is that marcium is still a focused product. The only "security" thing Macrium does is that programs outside of macium cant delete or modify the back files you create with macrium.. which is sensible and ithis protection feature can be switched off.

Edited June 1, 2022 by jamesmking

[Sherwood]

I third Macrium if this is a one-time operation.  I've used it for the reverse of this, cloning a 512GB boot drive to a new 2TB boot drive and expanding the partition, and it worked very well.  The free version was perfectly adequate.

I don't use it for regular backups because I'm a fool and don't perform those.

[HiWire]

I re-addressed the question of drive cloning today - EaseUS seems to be getting some recommendations but the company is based in Chengdu, China and it comes cheap at $20 or less for their home Disk Copy software. I'm somewhat leery of using this kind of tool - I remember when they started showing up at the top of Google search results a few years ago and I was skeptical then, too (i.e., they may be paying reviewers to promote their software).

Macrium Reflect X looks like a decent tool - it's not as cheap as EaseUS but they have a long history and a good reputation (Windows only). Acronis True Image may also be good - they add anti-ransomware tools which you may not need and some reviews noted a slower system startup (Windows and macOS). Both offer free trials and they start at about $50/year - subscription only.

You can also use Clonezilla, which is free and open source. It was developed by Steven Shiau and the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) in Taiwan and it's been around since 2007 (Windows, Intel macOS, Linux, Unix). The Clonezilla interface is definitely more technical and less beginner-friendly than the other software.

In my opinion, Windows is more of a serious candidate for drive cloning. Many tools exist at the enterprise level for backup and data management, but your average home/small business user doesn't do a good job of backup or disaster preparation. You can use these software tools along with an inexpensive drive/NAS to fully backup your system in case of data loss or hardware failure.

Apple's macOS has built-in tools for backup (Time Machine), data migration (Migration Assistant), and disk encryption (FileVault 2). I've found that these tools work extremely well for most users - enterprise admins have more expensive and sophisticated MDM (mobile device management) software like Jamf Pro, Kandji, NinjaOne to run their Macs.

Backblaze, a large cloud backup company, just released their quarterly drive stats for Q2 2025: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q2-2025/

It's reassuring to see that most hard drives across the board have lower than 1% failure rates, with a few exceptions. Backblaze uses consumer SATA hard drives rather than more expensive enterprise drives, so your mileage may vary. It's also important to note that these are failures in operation - if Backblaze received a dead-on-arrival drive from their supplier, that's not going to go in their metrics.