Best Win7 HDD/SSD/Optical cloning/copying tool?

[IDEngineer]

Long ago I used a commercial program called Nero to copy discs of almost any type. It had a super-useful feature of being able to create a standalone bootable CD/DVD, such that a brand new machine could be brought to life using a single optical disc (you gave it a bootable image of DOS which it loaded into a boot sector, and that allowed you to load enough drivers to get the maching moving). Sadly, Nero stopped working and I never needed to replace it... until now.

I recently realized that while I have a few decent laptops around, I'd be in a world of discomfort if my primary workstation were to fail. I built it in 2012 so it's getting up there in years. Thus I'm building a second "backup" workstation that will become my primary box, with my current machine becoming the backup. This also gives me an opportunity to refresh my hardware to the latest that officially supports Win7 (Skylake) and thus gain access to M.2 drives, etc.  (Please do not turn this thread into a "Windows version" argument, there are enough of those threads already.)

Once this box is built, I want to clone my existing SSD's and spinning drives onto the M.2's. Thereafter it would also be nice to regain the ability to copy optical discs (the main reason I have dual optical drives in my machines) and create self-booting optical discs.

I've seen recommendations for DDRescue but it appears to be more of a data recovery tool, not a cloning/copying tool. Ideally the tool will be able to do clones, copies by partition to manage changes in partition sizes between the source and target devices, etc.

I love "free" but am willing to pay <$100 for a commercial product if the price is justified.

Thanks!

[Mechatrommer]

There a lot of recovery tools nowadays like free candy.. i use aomei backupper, but some others swear by easeus..i never need optical cd/dvd anymore i disconnected the sata cable and power from pc, storage is now cheap. Will only connect it when i need to copy something to cd/dvd or fresh win install from zero. No need to boot from cd either nowadays, we now make bootable and from usb drive and have aomei recover/restore from there. Ps.. same experience with my nero cd/dvd maker, it doesnt work anymore under w7. Will need to find one replacement later, but there is no urgency.

[IDEngineer]

Right, but I'm not looking for a recovery tool. I'm looking for a cloning/copying tool. Strictly speaking I suppose the former could be used for the latter but I find the overall design of the two types of tools to be quite different based on the two usage cases. I'm also not sure how many recovery tools are intended to write to optical discs (I've never looked since I haven't needed that).

Any suggestions for a cloning/copying tool that runs under Win7? Thanks!

[Mechatrommer]

Backup means cloning too.. you can choose to match source's partition size or not, recovery packed single file or simply 1 to 1 clone. The clearest way to know if its for you is google... https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ubackup.com/help/disk-clone.amp.html

[Whales]

> Ideally the tool will be able to do clones, copies by partition to manage changes in partition sizes between the source and target devices, etc.

Clonezilla is what I have been using.  Specifically I use it for duplicating master Win10 disk images at work.

Pros:

• Auto-resizes partitions (useful when one manufacturer's 120GB disk is slightly smaller than the last one)
• Only copies data within partitions (faster than fully copying every byte)
• Free

Cons:

• Interface is a bit mismatched (most of the stuff is in full menus, but then it gives you a train of [Y/N] questions anyway)
• Uses terminology you might not be used to (eg 'grub MBR').  Most of the time you can ignore these options however, as they still auto-detect whether or not to use them.

Sidenote: sysprep sucks on Win10 (forces you through the first-time-experience thingy afterwards, resets your browser & associations, etc).  If you end up having to use it on Win7 (eg because windows might not like changing from SATA to a non-sata-M.2 variant) then you might need it and I hope it works better

[Mechatrommer]

AOMEI Backupper Standard Version (Free) can pretty much do all my system/data/HDD/SSD backupping/restoring/cloning jobs. GUI is very intuitive, no complicated jargon, just everything what you will expect. and whenever i hit by limitation the Pro version is only $40 ($50 with lifetime upgrades), i never really have a need to pay, one day maybe i will, just to support them. i did try EaseUS but i think AOMEI is better, but i keep the installer just in case, their monthly expensive fee payment scheme and $150 lifetime is not really tempting.