What's a good cloning software?

[K3Nv4]

I have a new ssd I want to clone my windows system to but I've come across some that get half way done and they're all like you need to buy the full version to do anything, any 100% free good cloning programs out there that aren't a headache?

 

[Lostbhoy]

Emperor Palpatines Imperial Clone & Go.exe version 66. It may rebel against you after a few million go's tho.


(Sorry, I'm rewatching Star Wars with the kids!!)

 

[tech3475]

1) Check the SSD maker as they may provide one for free
2) Maybe something like Macrium reflect free, but this requires imagining the old drive and then restoring from the image.

Edit:

Check the drive first to prevent issues with cloning, IIRC Sabrent by default use a different sector size count which can cause issues but they released a utility to change this.

 

[FAST6191]

I always liked https://clonezilla.org/ myself. Used it a fair bit for "tool" machines (all the dealer grade software to fix cars in one instance that was annoying to install/config manually but nice enough to drop new hard drive in, restore and go). New drive/partition has to be same size or larger though so "SSD" assuming this is not one to the other can make it a bit more tricky if you traded bulk storage for speed, or force you to go to gparted or something first to shrink the partition.

That said most of the time these days you grab someone's browser settings, email program settings if they use it, custom fonts and documents then everything else is largely immaterial while https://ninite.com/ handles the installs. Contemplate then a clean install, or indeed one of those jazzy custom installs that removes all the crap for you. Most clone programs are also going to be sector level rather than file level.

Crazy man's genius cousin option. New install and virtualise the old one -- virtualisation passthrough options these days mean everything is pretty close to the bare metal and thus not too many speed or usage penalties. Can then have the old going on while new gets configured and you decide what you really need.

 

[K3Nv4]

I have a 256gb ssd as my main os I should probably just back everything up and move it to my 512gb m.2 and use my 1tb ssd as additional storage.

 

[Sypherone]

You might try AOMEI Backupper, its free.
Windows has for sure a inbuild option for use in Powershell, maybe dism or xcopy. But never used them for this case, so cant finally say.
If u install the Windows Linux Subsystem, you might use dd from Linux for cloning.

 

[Dr_Faustus]

I always support Macrium free, when it works that is. Or if you bought Samsung Drives you can use their own cloning software too.

In the most difficult situations however I find that Ghost does the job without any complaints. That might be a bit more tricky to find however.