Backups: How to quickly clone a hard drive (SSD) using Macrium Reflect

If you have the funds to buy a spare SSD, you can easily clone your SSD or any other hard drive using Macrium Reflect, provided that your disk has the same or more free disk space

Macrium Reflect: Makes cloning disks as easy as 1,2,3 .. literally

1. Step Download a copy of Macrium Reflect – I suggest to grab a copy of the Pro version but there’s also a free version

2. Step After starting the program, Macrium Reflect will automatically recognize your drives and list them on the dashboard. Identify the drive that you want to clone and select it. One you do that, two links appear. One for cloning the drive and the other to create an image of that particular drive. Creating images does work well, but I noticed that you can quite easily run into problems with it so you can no longer open it properly and need to mount it. How you can mount .mrimg files is explained here

3. Step Select a disk to clone to

4. Step When selecting this drive, make sure there is enough disk space

5. Step Click Next and then on Advanced Options, you can either perform an Intelligent Sector Copy or you can Perform a Forensic Sector Copy. For more information about the two options read the information below

Difference between Intelligent Sector Copy and Forensic Sector Cop

You may ask now what is a Forensic Sector Copy. This is quite simple. Hard drives usually also keep deleted files and lots of slack space and unused information. If you are in need of a 1:1 copy of your hard drive (rarely required) and also need your deleted files on the new drives, then you should select Forensic Copy, else use the Intelligent Sector Copy that will be considerably faster

Continue Disk Cloning:

6. Step When you click Finish confirm that it will overwrite the drive

7. Step Macrium Reflect will now start cloning your drives. Have some patience, grab a tea or coffee or both and wait

8. Step That’s it

If you’re still having problems cloning your hard drives or solid state drives, let us know in the comment or post a specific question at qa.windows7themes.net

How long does it take to clone a hard drive

If you’re wondering how long it takes to clone a drive, here’s the time it took me to clone 60 GB SSD – with 8 GB free disk space, so approx. 16 minutes per 50GB on a fast drive. I assume this takes a lot longer on regular drives, but haven’t tested it yet. SSD’s usually have a faster file transfer rate (read/write operations complete faster)

Let us know how long your cloning operation takes if you try this out. Thanks!

Here’s what the final cloned drive looks like:

I will report back how this cloned drive works shortly.