How to Clone External Hard Drive Easily in Windows 11, 10, 8, 7

Wanna clone external hard drive to another external hard drive in Windows 10, 8, 7? Here comes an easy to copy external hard drive.

Posted by @Bryce December 17, 2024 Updated By @Bryce June 12, 2024

Need to clone my Samsung external hard drive

“As my 500 GB Samsung external hard drive contains plenty of files and is with many programs installed. To avoid data loss when my external hard drive is corrupted, I want to clone it to another 1 TB external hard drive in Windows 10 for a backup. So how can I copy the external hard drive to another one? Is there any advice or information? Thanks a lot!”

Advanced software for (external) hard drive clone in Windows PC

It’s not a bad decision to duplicate an external hard drive or internal hard drive for protecting important data stored on it. But how can you do that? In fact, it will be an easy task as long as you find out right hard drive cloning software. Among a lot of cloning software, AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional is highly recommended for Windows 11/10/8/7 and Windows XP/Vista users.

This advanced hard drive clone software offers two copy methods: “Clone Disk Quickly” and “Sector-by-Sector Clone”. The first one only copies used sectors or all sectors on the source external hard drive so that the destination disk can be smaller than the source disk as long as it has enough space to hold the used space of the original disk. The second method will clone every sector to the destination disk no matter it is used or not. If there are bad sectors on the source external hard drive, this method is useful.

In addition, this cloning software supports copying system disk to another disk and boot from the destination hard drive after clone so that you can upgrade or replace the current boot disk without reinstalling Windows and other pre-installed software.

Steps to clone external hard drive to another external hard drive

Now, connect the two external hard drives to your computer and make sure that they can be detected. Install and run AOMEI Partition Assistant. Or, you can download its demo version to have a try! Then let's see how it works

Free Download Win 11/10/8.1/8/7
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PS.: It is necessary to realize that all data on the destination external hard drive will be erased during this process. If you don’t want to suffer from data loss, make a backup in advance.

Step 1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant, click "Clone" in the main interface and select "Clone Disk".

Step 2. Choose the hard disk that you need to clone as the source disk and click "Next".

Step 3. Select the destination disk to store the data on the source disk, and then click "Next".

Step 4. Then, you can check the source and destination disk in the next window or change to “Sector to Sector clone”, and click the "Confirm" button to continue if there is no problem.

Here, you can also click the "Settings" button to adjust the partition size on the destination disk or tick "4k alignment" to improve the reading and writing speed of SSD if the target disk is an SSD drive.

Step 5. At last, click "Apply" and "Proceed" in the main interface to start cloning the hard drive.

Notes: ▸ AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional is for Windows PC users, if you are Windows Server users, you can employ AOMEI Partition Assistant Server. ▸ When you only want to clone certain data on the external hard drive, the feature Partition Clone Wizard can help you to perform this operation.

Conclusion

Whether you want to clone external hard drive to another external hard drive or clone internal boot hard drive to new hard drive, you can turn to this versatile and powerful hard drive cloning software – AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. And it possesses other multiple functions like cloning operating system partition to SSD, converting disk between MBR and GPT without deleting partitions, allocating free space from one partition to another, and wiping hard drive etc.