Gadgetory

so cloning is one of those things people seem to have typing and all caps style opinions on I mean remember how much controversy there was when scientists Xerox to Dolly the sheep fortunately though no one's going to protest outside your house if you decide to clone a hard drive or SSD but what exactly does cloning a drive mean and why might you want to do it well it's hopefully pretty obvious that cloning involves copying something in this case everything on one drive to another drive but there's a bit more to it than that you see when you fire up your Drive cloning software and press go it will duplicate the data from your old drive onto your new one sector-by-sector so not only will you have all the same files but they'll be arranged in the same physical order including free space and any fragmentation that was on the drive which you can learn more about up here but hold on a second Luke what if I want to backup my drive why can't I just copy and paste everything over using File Explorer great question and if the data you're trying to protect is stuff like videos documents and save games then yes simply copying everything over without any special software is a perfectly good option go ahead what if you're trying to backup your boot disk the one that contains your operating system your settings or programs your saved games whatever else simply playing the copy/paste game won't do as many of the files you need for an exact backup won't be accessible within the operating system while your computer is running and many modern programs have protections in place that will prevent them from running or they simply weren't designed to operate properly if they are copied in this matter however cloning software will ensure that you catch not only all of your files but also things like program configurations partition tables and the Boot Record this way if your existing drive fails or you're just migrating to a new one that's bigger or faster or whatever else you can plug right in and keep on computing seamlessly a closely-related solution is to create a disk image which is slightly more complicated instead of making an exact own of a drive on to a new physical device an image takes a snapshot of your disk including the Boot Record and other data that isn't normally accessible and saves that in a special image file on a different device if you ought to boot from it you'll have to restore the image to a third drive or back to your existing one using special software if you're recovering from a catastrophic failure system crash something like that or even a virus rather than upgrading the upside to imaging is that it usually gives you a few more options than just straight-up cloning as you can fit multiple disk images onto your backup media as long as it's spacious enough and some imaging software can automatically tweak your image regularly depending on what's changed on your drive you can also direct your imaging software to disregard free space so that the image won't take up quite as much room which you just can't do with cloning but because cloning creates an exact copy of your drive rather than an image file it is the quickest and sometimes simplest way to ensure you'll be back up and running again but whichever approach you choose there are a number of free disk imaging and cloning utilities out there that can help you make backups upgrades or even put the exact same disc with the same pre-loaded programs and data on lots of different computers and the best part is you don't even need to be a mad scientist or system admin to do it audible is offering everybody watching this video yes even you the editor a chance to try out their service for free first 30 days audible has an unmatched selection of audiobooks they used to have a say how many but I guess the number just keeps going up so much higher than it's become impossible to keep up with and audible is great for any time that you don't need something to do whether you're stuck in traffic on the train running errands you know the board at work hopefully no employers are watching this audible is fantastic and they've got everything I mean check this out Barsky the elephant's graveyard by Lawrence M throne is a sci-fi novel about a far-flung planet in a distant future ruled by sentient elephants as humans have disappeared from the galaxy and audible is offering a free audiobook with your trial to anyone who goes to audible.com slash tech quickie and signs up boom try it out start listening it's that easy alright guys like this video if you liked it dislike if you disliked it get subscribed because that's just cool and you get to see more cool videos so go Channel super fun because they're cool and they make cool videos and let us know in the comments down below if you want to see a tech quickie on a very specific topic I'll see you guys next time