Best Free Bootable Drive Cloning/Migration Software (HDD/SSD to SSD)?

Z

ZzBloopzZ

[H]ard|Gawd
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Sep 18, 2004
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Hello [H]!

I have been out of the loop this past 8 months, so need your expertise please. I am helping several friends/family members that are upgrading to SSD's. Some are going from a LARGER HDD to a SMALLER SSD. While others are going from a smaller SSD to a larger SSD.

What is the Best (IE: Most Reliable) Cloning Freeware software for this? I prefer something that I can boot via USB Flash Drive or Disc. I do use Parted Magic for file back ups and partitioning but have never used it for cloning as I have no idea how reliable it is for that feature. I believe Parted Magic uses CloneZilla for the cloning function.

Appreciate any feedback!
 
There are plenty of good, free cloning/imaging apps, but my pick is Macrium Reflect v6.
 
Yes - you can create a bootable CD (ISO) or boot directly from a USB drive.
 
Acronis is what I've been using for years. I've done a few HDD to SSD recently with it and it's been perfect. I got the license from my Crucial SSD.
I've also used ToDo Backup and Macrium. For those I didn't use a boot disk I just put the hard drives into a PC (not as the boot volume) and cloned them that way.
 
Per Clonezilla forums, Clonezilla is still considered a buggy/beta product after all these years. I rather avoid it all together. Also, I am done with Acronis as the other night I had a problem with a client unable to restore an image. Error was "Image is corrupt". Quick google search showed many people having this issue with Acronis 2014/2015. Plus it just seems to have gotten bloated these past few years.

I ended up spending hours reading around on the Wilders Security forums. Macrium Reflect appeared to fit my needs the best. I installed the free version and was able to create a bootable PE 10 in .iso format. I burnt one on disc and put other on a UDF. Really awesome tool as I have Windows 8.1 yet it was able to build a Windows 10 PE which is the most compatible on modern machines. I booted from it and it supports live cloning and/or back up/restore from an image.

Thanks everyone for the useful feedback.
 
I've used Clonezilla few times with success and no failures. Acronis has worked as well.
That said, the absolute best is the migration software packaged with Samsung Evo drives. It's simple, quick, and essentially one-button, even if the source and target drives are different sizes.
 
We use Active Boot Disk at work and it is very good. You can download a trial and it works very well. Making a bootable USB stick is stupid easy. The GUI to perform the imaging tasks is easy to use as well.
 
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