People who have gone through the ordeal of hard disk failures understand very well the perils of not backing up your data. If you have not backed up your data and your storage disk fails to work, then you have lost all of your data beyond recovery. While there are many file based backup solutions, keeping a clone of your hard disks is the ideal one. A disk clone is basically a full byte-by-byte backup of your disks. You can create a clone of your existing hard disk or a partition on that disk and whenever the need arises, you can restore the original contents as they were at the time of cloning.
The free software DriveClone can help you achieve this very easily. It supports both the hard disk drives (HDD) and the solid state disk drives (SSD). With DriveClone you can back up files, selected partitions or the entire storage disks containing the operating systems. You can perform single time clones of disks (clones that cannot be altered later), mirror disks (incremental clones that are updated from time to time), convert disk contents to virtual machine files for using in VMWare and more.
Basically all of the cloning operations require you to select one of the source disks/partitions that you want to clone and one destination partition where the clone files are copied. The rest of operations depend on the type of the cloning you choose. But these cloning operations put a lot of stress on your disks, so be careful not to run any other programs in the background or your PC might hang up.
The DriveClone can fine tune your storage disk before performing the cloning process. You can control these options from the Advanced Settings. From here, you can choose smart cloning that can skip unnecessary Windows’ files to save space, dissimilar boot cloning to help boot the clones from a variety of boot configurations, perfect defrag cloning that can defrag your disks before starting to clone them.
Conclusion: DriveClone is a free solution for cloning or mirroring your storage disks drives, supports both the older HDDs and newer SSDs and is able to clone the entire system including the Windows operating system. The paid versions of this software come packed with even more options.
You can download DriveClone from http://www.farstone.com/software/drive-clone.php.