Is Cloning a Hard Drive the Same as Mirroring?

No, cloning a hard drive is not the same as mirroring backup a hard drive.

Hard disk cloning means cloning all partitions, files, and other data of a hard disk to another disk. When cloning a system disk, it also includes the necessary boot partition and system files required to start the operating system.

• Usage: Cloning a hard drive is often used for purposes such as creating backups, upgrading to a larger hard drive or a faster hard drive, or setting up multiple identical systems.
• Result: After cloning, you have two identical hard drives, and you can swap them out or use the cloned drive as a backup.

Mirror backup is a normal copy of the selected folders and files at a given instant in time from one location to another. In a mirror backup, every file and directory in the source location is replicated in the destination location, making the two locations identical in terms of data.

• Usage: Mirroring is primarily used for data redundancy and fault tolerance. It ensures data availability in case of a single drive failure.
• Result: When you mirror a hard drive, you have multiple drives with the same data, and they work together to provide redundancy. However, it doesn't create a standalone, bootable copy of your entire system as cloning does.

If you are looking for a way to clone a hard drive, AOMEI Backupper is a great choice. It is an easy and renowned disk clone tool to make a full copy of your hard drive. It allows you to clone HDD to SSD/HDD or clone larger SSD to smaller SSD. It runs in an intelligent mode by default to copy only used sectors, skipping unused and logically bad sectors.