Watching it install endlessly, it looks like it promises to build a PE Windows Preinstallation Environment boot USB so I can clone a target drive when it is offline.

That – a boot USB – and speed, and resizing and aligning the target so a replacement SSD target copy will boot when making a copy of an existing HDD source – those are my goals.

It failed to successfully install on one PC ( “… Qt5Core.dll contains an error …”, so I’m moving on to try another PC.
.

This is my Go-To-Software Cloner, for all the reasons above. The only downside is that it takes almost 4-5 hours to exactly clone a hard drive. But it is an invaluable part of anyone’s PC toolkit. Easy to setup, use and clone. Thanks for a wonderful piece of software!

SOFTWARE FAILED TO REGISTER WITH THE PROVIDED CODE. TRIED MANY TIMES TO NO AVAIL.

In response to [@David] “… Thanks, Peter – I continue to love you and your reviews. In this case, I’ve never cloned a hard disk before, but now for the first time in my life I do have an external hard disk with lots and lots on it (mostly family, nature, and traveling pictures), and I do want to make a copy of it (I bought a second external hard disk), if only for feeling secure about not losing my data. Is this the kind of program I need to use, to clone the one disk onto the other? Letting it take a long time is no special problem for me. As one who’s never done this sort of thing, is the UI simple enough for me to know what I have to do? …”

Thanks, I hope I help make SharewareOnSale a functional place to share.

On either of those two external drives, you don’t boot from the operating system, and you don’t run software that is installed on those external drives, they are just data.

DATA does not need to be ‘cloned’ – it can be copied, and it will be readable no matter where it’s copied.

The reason to clone is to copy installed programs and bootable operating systems that will not work if they are merely copied, so, to get a copy of an Operating System or copies of installed programs, they must be installed . . . or cloned.

But not data, data can simply be copied.

Copying is FREE.

To copy data in Windows, just drag-and-drop from the contents of one drive to the other drive.

Once.

The first time.

Easy.

– – – – –

But later, after the first copy, as you add stuff to one drive, how do you eventually make sure the second drive is updated?

How do you drag just new stuff?

You can’t.

You drag-and-drop everything.

And then, drag-and-drop would have endless requests for permission to overwrite stuff that already exists on the target drive from the past copy.

After the first copy, you’d just want new stuff, not everything over and over again..

How do you find new stuff only?

Easy.

Let the computer find it for you.

FREE.

Instead of cloning software, Microsoft programmers use XCopy or RoboCopy, both are installed FREE with Windows.

Examples?

Say you have USB drive E: and USB drive F: …

At a DOS prompt or [ Run ] command or when making a batch file, type:

… for XCopy:

xcopy e:\ f:\ /s /d /f /r /h /i /c /y

… where:
… /s = get subdirectories
… /d = by date, only overwrite with newer versions of any existing files
… /f = full display, show what’s happening
… /r = get read-only files
… /h = get hidden and system files
… /i = initialize new directories on the target if needed
… /c = continue past errors
… /y = answer yes to any questions

… for RoboCopy:

robocopy e:\ f:\ /s /xo /xj /w:0 /r:0 /eta /v

… where:
… /s = get subdirectories
… /xo = exclude older files that are already on the target drive
… /xj = exclude junctions, the place-holder folders that Microsoft sometimes builds. this avoids endless loops
… /w:0 = wait zero, that is, do not wait, act immediately
… /r:0 = retry zero, that is, do not retry on error, such as if a file is open and in use
… /eta = estimate the time of arrival, show how long each file is taking
… /v = verbose, show what’s happening

Those single-line commands run from a DOS prompt, or put one of those lines in a batch file with:
pause
… as the second line, and it will wait when done, showing you the total of all the work it just did for you.

– – – – –

If you must drag-and-drop, be ready the second time to answer any ‘overwrite?’ questions – I wedge a paperclip holding down the [ C ] key for ‘continue’, and I go away while it copies everything.

I use FREE TeraCopy v2.3 for smarter drag-and-drop, where I can quickly tell it to overwrite, skip, or rename duplicate files, then I go away while it works.

– – – – –

In theory, we could ‘copy’ our operating system and installed files and Windows registry, but there are many details to preparing a target, partitioning, formatting, editing boot instructions, and so on, hence cloning software just bypasses all that and make a, well, a clone, with all those setting included.

But cloning wipes the target, and that’s wrong for iterative, incremental data backup over time.

So just copy, leaving existing files in place on the target, files that were copied there before.

I have one drive I walk to each computer and I run that RoboCopy line from C:\ to F:\ from each computer to the backup drive, and all it does is copy over new data from each computer, ignoring any existing stuff already on the backup drive, and from the second time I run RoboCopy, it goes rather more quickly, only scanning the target backup drive and finding what’s missing to be copied over, not having to copy everything over and over again, which cloning would have to do in order to get everything.

I can’t boot from the backup drive, but it at least has copies of all my data.

Copy can be told to get only new stuff the first time it’s run, of course, but more importantly, it also can be told to only get new stuff from the second time it’s run, so that makes sense for data backup.

From a DOS prompt, type /? after a command to learn more, and web-search to see how others use that command.

DoYourClone would be distracting overkill, but maybe OK to copy a drive once, say, if you’re going to send a copy of the drive to someone and then never update that drive again <– and THAT makes this post all about DoYourClone! ;-)

Questions?

Thanks, Asharaf, for letting us explore this and share.
.

Hmm … how to make this about DoYouClone? ;-)

In response to [@David] “… @Peter I cannot thank you enough for your complete answer, both explaining everything clearly, and giving a fully detailed set of instructions of more than one way to do what I want to do, and of how you do it. Out of this world! Fantastic! Amazing! Yes, and much thanks to Ashraf – not only for what he gives us – but also for giving us this forum in which to meet and to share and to help each other. Peter, I think you and I have both been here with Ashraf for at least ten years. May I be audacious and ask you another question? If no, then stop here. If yes, forgive me if I write too long. As I wrote, the first thing I do want to do is to copy data from one old external hard disk to a new one, for backup … and, as you so keenly noted, to keep the back up updated. But I’ve wondered about whether or not to get another external hard disk for a different purpose. I used an HP Pavilion g laptop for very many years (primarily for downloaded papers and for papers I write … inter alia, I have two Ph.D’s and have been active in several fields beyond those, and, as I wrote, for family and travel/nature pictures). Yes, and I did download to the HP numerous programs from Sharewareonsale (I actively used only a few). At one point the original HP’s hard disk broke down, and I put in a new internal drive/disk and started again. I updated from Windows 7 to 10. Now, after several more years, I suspect my HP is filling up, and running down. So I’ve gotten a Lenovo ideapad 3, and have been getting into using it – with Windows 11. Strictly speaking, I can still run the HP, and I did copy all the downloads, pictures, and documents onto the external disk drive I was using with it (WD Elements, 2 GB). But I wonder whether I ought to get another external disk/drive, and clone the HP internal disk/drive to it, just so I have everything that I ever had/used/did on the HP available. That’s my question – is it a good idea to go to that trouble, or does it not matter enough to spend the money on a new external drive, plus the time and the trouble? If I did that, would I run that external drive some time on my Lenovo ideapad? (Just a brief personal word to introduce me: the first program I wrote and sold ($300) was about 53 years ago; when microprocessors were born I learned how to program them, moving bits so I could use the tiny memories efficiently (remember 64k????); but I’ve moved on to many other things, so I’m now pretty much just a user and not into programming, and not completely up-to-date. So your help, Peter, really means a lot to me!) …”

#1 – Drives are cheap.

#2 – Yes, cloning <– with DoYouClone ( got it in ! ) the HP will
– get everything,
– AND allow reading everything from the target external USB drive on the Lenovo,
– AND allow the target cloned external USB drive to boot the HP if it ever needs to be swapped into the HP.

BUT the external USB drive must internally be the same shape and size and attachment as the internal HP drive if you ever expect to swap it into the HP to recover from a failure of the original HP drive.

Few WD external USB drives can be removed from their external cabinets ( ‘shucked’ ) and then be inserted into a computer because they are not SATA drives inside, they are USB drives inside.

Seagate and Toshiba external USB drives tend to contain SATA drives in their cabinets and can therefore be ‘shucked’ and the internal SATA drive itself can be swapped into a computer to boot it up.

Plus, any local computer shop can sell you a SATA drive in an external USB cabinet regardless of the brand names of the parts, Microcenter and Amazon and everyone else sells the individual parts, cheap.

So, again, the ONLY advantage of DoYourClone is it will make a cloned backup boot disk.

If that’s valuable, go for it.

If you never expect to boot from the backup USB drive, then FREE XCopy or RoboCopy will do just fine to copy everything, including Windows and Programs ( they just won’t run, but they are backup copies that are useful if you ever need to search for and replace a corrupted driver or corrupted program file ), AND XCopy and RoboCopy will then pick up where they left off whenever you have new stuff to add to the external backup drive ( DoYouClone would wipe the drive first, and if the drive actually contained the ONLY copy of something, it would be wiped out – ouch! ).

To paraphrase Neil Sedaka, backing up is hard to do.

Philosophically, anyway.

I hope I’ve helped you – and others – simplify how to look at backing up:

– data, over and over,

– or boot+windows+programs+data, once,

… and helped simplify how to do either task.

– – – – –

Don’t be shy, [@David], tell us what program you created and sold!

I wrote a Tic-tac-toe program for the $99 Timex Sinclair and tried to sell it for $1 ( on cassette, no less ! ), but that was so cheap, people couldn’t believe it could possibly be worth it, so nobody bought it – I should have made it $9.95 at least!

– – – – –

Thanks again, Ashraf, for letting us explore this and share.
.

@Peter
Thanks again (and again to Ashraf!)!
You even managed to make this clear and helpful answer fit in with DoYouClone – very well done!
Thanks for the clear advice; now I have what to think about.
The $300 program was really simple, so early in the computer days that it gave a businessman a way to make some $60,000.
The program gave tables with the interest on different dollar amounts at different interest rates for each day of the year (two versions – a 360 day year, and a 365 day year).
The businessman printed a thousand copies of a book with all the tables, day by day, and sold them for $60 to banks that used them to calculate the interest a person would have to pay on a loan composed of units, tens, hundreds, thousands, etc.
Again, a thousand thanks!
(Maybe some day I’ll tell you what I did with one of the beginning microprocessors, much more interesting..)

@Peter
Thanks for your “final report”!
You’re amazing!