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Why would I want to clone my drive?
You may want to replace an older spinning hard drive with a new SSD, or upgrade from a smaller drive to a larger SSD. With data cloning, this can be a simple in place upgrade. Just give us your old drive, and we will copy its contents onto a new SSD for you. Then simply install the new SSD in the place of the old drive, and your computer will function just as it did before – only now faster!
What is drive cloning?
A clone of your old drive is a complete one to one copy of all of the data on the drive. This is more than simply backing up your files – it also includes your software programs, operating system, and the other required information to make your computer function.
How does cloning work? What are partitions?
Your computer’s storage drive is divided into sections, known as partitions. These can differ in size, and are used for different purposes, such as your main operating partition, the computers recovery information, and the bootloader. Your computer likely has at least 3 partitions.
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How cloning works is by copying the desired partitions, and the information required for the computer to find them, onto a new drive. You can chose not to copy certain partitions if you no longer need them on the new drive, and you can resize partitions if you are moving from a smaller drive to a larger drive (or use the extra space to make another partition).
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A simple example of a clone of a standard drive to a larger drive, extending the main partition to fill the extra space.
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A more complicated example, with two extra partitions added for files in the extra space.
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In order to store data in a partition, it needs to be formatted with a file system, such as NTFS (for Windows computers), HFS+ or APFS (for Macs), or ext3/4 (for Linux). Most drive management software, such as Windows Disk Management and Disk Utility on macOS, will prot you to format a new partition after creating one.
How can Universal Byte help me with cloning?
At Universal Byte, we’re here to help you with all your computer needs.
For our service you can either provide just the drive you would like cloned, or your whole computer.
Before we begin, please make sure you have fully shut down your computer, and it is not in hibernation (suspend to disk) mode. On Windows 8 and later, you may need to hold down ‘Shift’ while shutting down your computer.
Let us know if you would like any changes made to the partition layout, otherwise as standard we will copy the drive as is, expanding the partition to fill any available space on the new drive.
If your new drive happens to be smaller than the old drive, this is fine so long as the used space in the main partition is less than the size of the new drive.