4 Best Free Disk Cloning Software for Windows 11/10/8/7

Why Need Disk Cloning Software?

As a matter of fact, disk clone will copy all the data from the source disk to destination disk without reinstalling everything, like Windows 7/8/10 operating system, installed programs, system settings, videos, pictures, documents, etc.

In daily life, there are many occasions that you may need hard drive cloning software to clone disk in Windows operating system:

• Upgrade smaller disk to larger disk to get more storage space to deal with Windows running slowly due to the low disk space error.

• Move Windows 7/8/10 operating system, and all other data to SSD to get better performance, faster boot, faster reading and writing speed, which is important for gamer, designer, etc.

• Cloning failing hard drive to prevent data loss. If the system hard drive is failing, you could restore everything to another disk using the drive cloning software and make it bootable.

• Make an exact copy for all your data on the disk. You could restore all your files if something bad happened to your hard drive.

No Disk Cloning Software Built-in Windows 10/8/7

As far as we all known, Windows 10/8/7 offers you Windows backup software only:

• Backup and Restore software (Windows Vista, 7, 8, 10) to create a system image and file backup, which means you will get an image file (ZIP or VHD file), you have to restore the image file to use all the data.

• File History (Windows 8.1 and 10), backs up your files for you. 

• Wbadmin or NTBackup command line could be your fit if you prefer to use CMD clone drive.

However, there is no free cloning software built-in Windows system. Hence, if you want to clone HDD to SSD free, a comprehensive yet free hard drive cloning software is necessary.

What Is the Best Cloning Software 2023?

There are many hard drive cloning software available online and choosing one can be a real challenge. To save your time, we have searched the web and selected the best disk cloning applications that offer great value for money.

• #1. AOMEI Backupper
• #2. Macrium Reflect 8
• #3. DiskGenius
• #4. DriveImage XML

1. AOMEI Backupper

AOMEI Backupper, the best free disk cloning software for Windows PCs, offers you an easy and safe way to clone disk, and it’s highly recommended by vast amount of users due to the reliable features, user friendly interface, and excellent performance. There are three types of backups in AOMEI Backupper - System Clone, Disk Clone, and Partition Clone.

It supports a wide range of hard drives, including HDDs, SATA SSDs, NVMe M.2 SSDs, USB flash drives, and SD cards, etc. With its Intelligent Clone feature, you can clone disk to smaller disk as long as the target disk could hold all the data from source disk. This free disk clone software provides powerful features to assist you to clone disk safely and flexible:  

🌟 Pricing: Personal license: $39.95, Business license: $49.95 - $ 699, 30-day trial.

★Tips:
✍Edit Partitions: If you are cloning disk to larger disk, you could adjust the partition size on the destination automatically to fully use the capacity while cloning, please upgrade to AOMEI Backupper Professional or other premium editions to try.   
✍If the edit partitions option is not used while cloning disk to larger disk, you will generate an unallocated space on the target disk when it’s done. To fully use the unallocated space, you could merge the unallocated space to existing partitions easily, or create new partition in Disk Management to store data.

2. Macrium Reflect 8

Macrium Reflect 8 Free is the latest free disk backup and cloning software from Macrium. It allows users to create exact copies of entire hard disks or individual partitions. The software's cloning feature is particularly useful for transferring all data, programs and settings from one computer to another. It enables users to clone their entire hard disk or create a bootable USB or CD/DVD, which can be used to restore the cloned image on a new computer or a replacement hard disk.

🌟 Pricing: Personal license: $69.95, Business license: $75 - $580, 30-day trial.

3. DiskGenius

DiskGenius is a powerful data recovery and disk management tool for creating, resizing, cloning, backing up and recovering partitions and files on Windows-based computers. It offers a user-friendly interface and has a range of features that make it a popular choice among users.

🌟 Pricing: Personal license: $69.95, Business license: $75 - $580, 30-day trial.

4. DriveImage XML

DriveImage XML is a powerful but free to use Windows disk cloning solution. It is very lightweight and can be configured for direct disk-to-disk cloning as well as for creating image-based hard disk backups to files. DriveImage XML uses Microsoft VSS to create images. Using DriveImage XML, you can create "hot" images from used hard drives. The images are stored in XML files, so you can access them from any supported third-party software.

🌟 Pricing: Business 5 license: $100.

Write in the End

If you have been looking for free disk cloning software, I believe you will get some help from it after reading this article. With one of these four programs, you should be able to clone disks. Yes, some of them may be a bit difficult to use and some may not have all the features you are looking for. But each of them should allow you to clone the source disk to the target disk in order to make your disaster recovery plan effective.

Besides, you could try create WinPE bootable media to troubleshoot computer problems, and try system clone with AOMEI Backupper Professional if you just want to migrate Windows 10 OS to SSD. For who are running the Windows Server, like Windows Server 2003, 2008, 2011, 2012, 2016, 2019 (including R2), SBS 2003, 2008, 2011, it’s worth to try AOMEI Backupper Server to enjoy more advanced features, like command line clone, real time file sync, dynamic volume clone, universal restore, etc.