MiniTool Drive Copy 5.0

Overview

Getting insurance for a movable or an immovable property is considered a wise decision which saves you in the time of an unfortunate event. Likewise, creating a backup of your system data is an insurance that you must resort to for avoiding loss of your invaluable data. MiniTool Drive Copy is one such tool which helps you in backing up your important data and is designed to copy and clone FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, VFAT, NTFS, or NTFS5 partitions, and IDE, SATA, SCSI or removable disks. When disk or partitions backup is done, the data is kept safely even after a system crash, moreover, the system can also boot directly from the new disk.

Installation

Installation process involves generic steps and is a matter of few seconds. After confirming generic details like setup destination location, Start Menu folder, and additional icon (desktop icon), the application is ready for use. Following operating systems support this application: Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7/8.

Interface

Interface of MiniTool Drive Copy is simple, decent, and user-friendly. The home page displays two main buttons for the tasks – Disk to Disk and Partition to Partition. On selection of any one button, a new window is displayed showing the disks that need to be copied, followed by another window showing the destination disk. Although its operation is very intuitive but still if there is need to view documentation, it can be viewed from its Website’s link shown in the home page.

Pros

• MiniTool Drive Copy can make a disk same as the original disk it terms of format and content and when the data is corrupted or is lost, then the copied disk can restore the original data
• An essential measure that users should take is to create specific partitions in system which store backup of important but rarely used data. To save this partition data, choose “Partition to Partition” mode to copy the partition
• Cloning large data into a new disk is a challenge as it takes a lot of time; with this tool’s “Disk to Disk” mode, you can easily clone disk in much lesser time
• It is a less known fact that disk clone is faster than partition clone, so by cloning disk with this tool you can get the benefit in situations when disk files are lost or deleted by mistake, and the backup of previous disk can be used to recover the whole disk
• Copy-Paste or Cut-paste options are not always reliable as any sort of interruption like system shutdown can result in loss of the original data. For this reason, it is better to carry out Hard Drive Partition copy with this tool to ensure data completeness
• Disk Image technique is normally reliable for quick and safe transfer of large data; MiniTool Drive is an excellent drive copy software that can be used for this purpose
• It supports FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, VFAT, NTFS and NTFS5 partitions

Cons

Not exactly a negative here but be careful during disk copy operation, as all the pre-existing content in the target partition is deleted.

Alternatives

Software that can be used as alternatives to MiniTool Drive Copy are – Clonezilla, Acronis True Image, Macrium Reflect, and DriveImage XML. Clonezilla is a partition or disk clone tool which can save and restore used blocks in hard drive. Acronis True Image is a backup tool that can save complete image of the entire system in both local and cloud storage. Macrium Reflect  helps you to back up the entire system and schedule backups. DriveImage XML program enables you to take back up of logical drives and partitions to image files, view and extract files, restore these images to same or a different drive, and much more.

Conclusion

MiniTool Drive Copy is an efficient tool which can help you backup your data easily that too without paying a price. The simple and intuitive interface makes it easy for anyone to use this tool, plus detailed documents for its functions are available on its website. Use of this tool is recommended to all the users.