Long story short I need to clone a hard drive over the weekend which has a lot of images stored on it so that they can be uploaded at a later date to the cloud.

Needs about a 1tb drive to write it to.

What software is easiest for a bit of a pc numpty to use to get a good quality copy and ideally it would write to an external drive rather than fitting another drive in the pc.

Clonezilla

Clonezilla +1 (although its not a simple tool it requires a bit of reading the manual)

Acronis is point and click and has a Trial version but i don’t know how funcional it is, it used to come free with lots of HDs/SSDs when you purchased them so maybe you already have a copy?

I use AOMEI, you can clone individual partitions or entire drives, as so does many others.

The interface is clean and simple to use.

If it’s just the photos you need, why the need to clone the drive? You could just plug an external drive in and then drag & drop.

Thanks. Looked at a few videos and think I can manage Clonezilla as long as it can manage lots of large image files.

It’s Dicom images stored in a Pacs imaging system. They can be exported from the system but not that easily.

Again do you really want to clone? Not just copy various files?

Never used it, but AOMEI is free at the moment:

https://www.techradar.com/news/get-aomei-backupper-pro-free-for-world-backup-day

Never used it, but AOMEI is free at the moment:

Good shout, I have used the free standard version for years and its good.

FTK imager always used to be free if you run out of options.

xora wrote:

Clonezilla +1 (although its not a simple tool it requires a bit of reading the manual)

You can just select all default options apart from selecting source and destination and it works just fine – sure it doesn’t have a fancy graphical interface but it’s not at all complicated to do a simple clone.

bruk wrote:

Thanks. Looked at a few videos and think I can manage Clonezilla as long as it can manage lots of large image files.

It doesn’t care what’s on the disk, it just clones it, which is what you asked for – as others have commented, if you just want to copy the image files then you don’t necessarily need to clone the disk.

I’ve used macrium reflect free version before, easy to use, you don’t need the paid version unless you want advanced features like incremental scheduled backups and stuff like that.

But as said, if you are just moving files around you don’t need any special software.

Never used it, but AOMEI is free at the moment:

I discovered AOMEI about a week ago, and it looks excellent for a no-faff backup solution.  The free PRO version is a steal, thanks for the link.

Cheers guys. The dicom images were within the Pacs system and needed to be exported via it to be readable elsewhere. With over 30,000 images and no clear way to multi export it was looking like cloning being the best option.

Have found a way now to multi export so have 1 external Hd with a clone and 1 currently transferring the images only still running.

I’ve used DriveImage XML for years to clone Windows drives, and it’s a popular lightweight tool. Uses the Windows built in Volume Shadow Copy Service to copy the drive live. The result backup image is a bunch of spanned files (of CD size each) and an xml file describing them.

It’s a raw functional product, nothing fancy looking, not bloated and fluffy or trying to sell you stuff and often found on recovery boot CD products.

Is Maricum Reflect still good?  It is version 7 now.

The cloning version you have to pay.