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.

Bryce

By Bryce / Updated on May 12, 2023

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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

Download Demo Win 11/10/8.1/8/7/XP
Secure Download

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. In the main interface, click Clone from the top pane and choose Clone Disk.

Disk Clone Wizard

Step 2. It will pop up a small window, offering you two copy methods. Choose one based on your specific situation.

Clone Methods

Note: This first way requires that the capacity of the destination external hard drive should be not smaller than the used space on the source external hard drive; the second way demands that the size of the target external drive should be larger than or equal to the size of the source external drive.

Step 3. Choose your source external hard drive and click on Next icon.

Select Source Disk

Step 4. Select your target external hard drive and click Next.

Select Destination Disk

Note: If the external hard drive is a solid state drive, tick Optimize the performance of SSD to align SSD partitions.

Step 5. In this window, you can resize the partitions on the destination disk.

Edit Disk

Note: If you clone hard drive to the smaller hard drive, the first option Clone without resizing partitions will be greyed out.

Step 6. Click Apply>Proceed to commit operations.

Apply

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.

Bryce
Bryce · Staff Editor
Bryce is an editor of AOMEI Technology, he covers backup & restore, hard disk & partitions management, cloud files transfer, website & database backup and so on for AOMEI. He enjoys helping people find solutions to their problems. He loves traveling, Sleeping, reserching and so on. He enjoys helping people find solutions to their problems. He loves traveling, Sleeping, reserching and so on. He would like to spend all time on reaserching computer problems. He is a very cute boy.