It’s not only sheep that get cloned nowadays. Cloning your hard drive is one of the most secure ways of either backing-it-up or ensuring that you’ve always got a virtual version of it to work from if your original drive fails. For system administrators, it can be used it to dramatically reduce the time spent restoring, reconfiguring or copying data onto other hard drives.
Virtual CloneDrive behaves just like a physical drive but it only exists virtually. You can generate image files with Virtual CloneDrive and then drag and drop them into the drive as if it were a real one. DriveClone meanwhile is designed more as a backup tool which compresses everything on the original drive but makes them easily accessible on a partition.
If you’re not comfortable or familiar with the whole cloning process then XXClone is one of the simplest tools out there. The advantage of using this program too is that all clones that are made are self bootable which is essential if you suffer failure of your original hard drive. Another easy to use solution is HDClone Free Edition which is especially designed for recovering data from defective hard disks.
