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Cloning hard drives with Iperius, one of the best backup programs



Cloning a hard drive is a crucial operation for data security, operating system distribution, and the rapid and efficient migration from an HDD to an SSD.

Iperius has powerful disk imaging features, allowing you to back up the entire system, which can then be restored via the Iperius recovery disk and Iperius Recovery Environment®.

This feature allows you to create an exact copy of a disk and its partitions, enabling effective data cloning.

With Iperius, it is possible to clone the disk of a computer running Windows 11 or Server 2025, obtaining a perfect duplicate that is useful for backups, restoration, or to transfer a Windows installation to another disk or different hardware.

Therefore, Iperius is both a backup software and a tool for cloning hard drives. During the cloning process, the content of the source disk, including partitions, is saved into an image file (VHDX). A new disk is then created based on this image. The process occurs in two phases: first, creating the image and then restoring it, which can be done on a Hyper-V system (instant-restore, P2V) or on a new disk via Iperius Recovery Environment®. The difference between backup and cloning is subtle, but it lies in the structure of the image file and the restoration methods.

To learn how to create a copy of your hard drive, check the tutorial: Disk Cloning.

To restore it to a new disk, follow this guide: Restore a system image backup.

This method is also useful for replicating a Windows installation on multiple machines.

Cloning hard drive to SSD

If you want to clone a hard drive to an SSD, make sure the target disk has at least the same capacity as the source disk, regardless of the actual space occupied in the image file.

A software for cloning HDDs and SSDs is the ideal solution to protect important data, creating a faithful copy locally or in the Cloud (Google Drive, Amazon S3, etc.). Restoration via the Iperius recovery disk is fast and effective, even on different hardware. This method is particularly useful in the case of ransomware attacks or system failures, as it allows for the complete restoration of the operating system, settings, files, and applications without needing to reinstall anything.

BitLocker: Iperius supports cloning disks encrypted with BitLocker.
For more details: BitLocker encryption guide.



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