PSA: Disk Genius is a user-friendly disk cloning solution

[glaurung]

The default free software recommendation for cloning a hard disk, Clonezilla, is actively and aggressively user hostile, like many programs from the world of Linux. But it's free, and comes with the special sparkle of being open source, so it gets recommended a lot.

This has led me to have many bouts of swearing and struggling with balky upgrades than I can count. But it seemed all the user-friendly alternatives that I could find were for-pay products that haughtily refused to clone a boot disk unless you forked over tons of money for the pro version.

Now, I have finally, finally found a free trial app that lets you clone a system disk, with no fuss or bother about size, without having to jump through an intricate dance of copying each individual partition and hoping it would still boot when all was done.

Disk Genius is one of those rare birds, a for-pay app where the free version is actually extremely useful and capable. It's almost never recommended for partition wrangling and cloning, because it's marketed as a data recovery app... but what it actually is, is a universal, do-everything tool for dealing with computer storage devices and the data on them, including cloning, partition resizing, and recovering lost data, lost drives, etc. And now, finally, I can tell clonezilla and its user-hating interface to not let the door hit its ass on the way out.
Disk Genius: one of those apps that you wonder where it was hiding from you all these years. A+. Highly recommended.

Comments

[glaurung]

nerdy footnote: the main problem I've been having with cloning these days is that whereas in the windows XP era, one could just clone the C drive, mark it active, and things would work, nowadays Windows creates two partitions for itself, both of which are required to boot, and with GPT partition schemes and so on, making a system bootable even if you copy all the partitions is no longer so simple.

My workaround, since clonezilla would not clone the entire disk if the new disk was smaller, was to install windows on the new disk, then clone the old C drive to the new disk in place of the freshly installed C. But that solution doesn't work well with Windows 10 because of all the different versions (builds) of Windows 10 - the data on the two partitions needs to be from the same build. Microsoft's download tools only let you access the latest build, and that works if the laptop is fully up to date, but it won't always be so, and so on. And there might be additional hijinks going on that I don't yet grok. Any which way, my workaround is fine for windows 7, but fails for windows 10.

(Insert tiny rant here about how MS's greatest deepest wish is to become just like Apple in every way, even if Apple's way of doing things is wrong, and thus you cannot get an older version of Windows from their download tool if you need one)