HDClone Free Edition 14.0.0

Overview

Need to make an exact replica of a disk drive? HDClone is a great application for cloning entire drives. This allows you to create an exact copy of a disk drive and this includes Solid State Drives, SD Cards, Hard Disk Drives, external drives, pretty much anything that stores data. One of the benefits of cloning a drive with your operating system is that it can be used a backup. Meaning that if your operating system completely crashes, instead of doing a new setup and re-installing all your applications you can use the copy you made to restore your hard drive to the exact point you created the clone image.

HDClone is also a bootable application, which comes in very handy if you are using it to restore a backup copy of your drive. Even if you haven’t made a backup, the bootable HDClone system now has a revised graphical user interface, which you can use to try and recover data from a corrupted disk. Another great use for HDClone is if you’re purchasing a new computer, but you want to keep the set-up of your old computer, you can clone the hard drive of the old machine and restore it to the new machine. If your’ new machine has a larger hard drive, HDClone can allocate the additional space.

HDClone offers a variety of editions to fit your needs. The commercial editions of HDClone include HDClone Basic Edition, HDClone Standard Edition, HDClone Professional Edition, and HD Enterprise Edition. Each offer additional features. There is also an HDClone Free Edition which is free for non-commercial use and provides enough basic features to make it a worthwhile download.

Installation

Installation is a standard install. System will require a reboot once installation is complete. HDClone is available on Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Server 2003/2008/2012

Interface

The main menu screen for HDClone is fairly easy for even beginners to get the hang of it. You’re greeted with several options in the Free Edition that run under three categories, Backup, Recovery, and Cloning.  Each offers a different solution for backing up and restoring drives. There is also a classic view option which doesn’t differ much from the startup screen, but it simplifies the process by reducing the selection of choices.

Pros

• Able to copy the entire contents of a drive.
• Has its own bootable system.
• Works with cloning a drive to a separate drive

Cons

• None listed.

Alternatives

Looking at alternative options for cloning hard drives, you have Clonezilla which also offers its own free and commercial licenses and is a fairly popular option. Norton Ghost is another option you have, though it’s a more pricy alternative and you really won’t get much more functionality versus free software like Clonezilla.

Conclusion

HDClone is a nice clean and simple to use cloning application. I didn't run into any issues using the application and I was impressed at how easily I was able to create backups or even create an HDClone boot tool. It may not have quite the popularity of Clonezilla, but it surely matches its strengths with a good list of features and options. If you’re looking for an application to backup your hard drive, move your data completely to another drive, or you even just want a pre-boot environment to work with your drives, HDClone is a good option and is worth trying out.