HDClone Review

Having seen how the free edition of HDClone handles disk cloning and disk imaging tasks, I will next be looking at how the Advanced edition of the same tool (currently priced at €60.26) handles these same workloads and what additional features are provided. For reference, Miray Software offer four professional editions of the software (plus enterprise and technician options not relevant to this review) with pricing between €16.72 for the Basic edition and €85.34 for the Professional edition featuring virtually all (non-enterprise) features.

After installing and activating HDClone Advanced Edition, many additional tools become available over and above the free edition as can be seen on the upgraded application homepage.

Starting off with the premium edition of the disk cloning utility and we see one of the first benefits of this advanced edition, this being the option to clone an entire physical disk whilst also able to (optionally) select which partitions are included or excluded from the process. As can be seen below, selecting partitions to be included involves first selecting the source disk and, via the drop-down menu, then selecting the partitions to be included (with non-selected partitions excluded).

With the correct source disk and partitions selected, this advanced edition of HDClone opens up additional options including being able to select the “HotCopy” and “LiveImage” technology being used alongside a pre-selected set of exclusions (a list pre-determined by HDClone).

Selecting the target disk is followed by configuring additional options such as specifying that the source partitions be kept at their original size or (as can be seen in the drop-down menu below) automatically re-sized to fit a larger or smaller source disk when migrating to a different size of disk drive.

With the source disk plus any relevant options selected, the target disk to be cloned can be specified. Given this now being done using the advanced edition of the tool, we now have more options available including options to automatically verify the copied data, restart or shut down the device upon completion plus the option to make use of “FastCopy” technology.

Once copying has completed, the newly cloned disk will be immediately ready for use. If selected then HDClone will perform additional verification on the target disk prior to the operation completing (a recommended step when copying an important disk such as main system disk with an operating system installed upon it).

Having now seen a disk cloning operation through to completion, another useful tool found within HDClone Advanced Edition is the ability to make disk image backups via the “SmartImage” module. This special “SmartImage” tool, available only in premium editions of HDClone, helps to make faster and more efficient the process of creating a disk image by ensuring only actively used parts of the disk (containing useful data) are included.

As can be seen above, “SmartImage” works in much the same way as was seen when creating disk images earlier on using the free edition of the tool. The advanced edition affords some additional options here including being able to make use of the “QuickCompress” technology, advanced image splitting methods, automatic data verification, password protection plus “FastCopy” technology (which increases copying speeds via parallel reading and writing of data during the operation).

NB – By using another advanced option box to the one seen above and we can also specify to exclude system swap files (saving more disk space) as well as excluding selected system files as was seen when creating a disk image in the free edition.

With all options and advanced “SmartImage” options now set, the process of creating the new disk image can be started.

Once the creation of the “SmartImage” imaging process is complete, the disk image file (or multiple files if file splitting is configured) will become available on the target disk. This file can then be stored for safekeeping or, if making use of HDClone Advanced Edition or higher, can then be used as the base for further disk imaging operations thanks to support for differential imaging.

As can be seen above, the “Backup Changes” (delta imaging) module is where it is possible to select a base disk image (such as the one created earlier on using the “SmartImage” module) and then, once running, only changes to the source disk will be backed up (creating additional disk image files for each differential backup). These differential backups, when combined with the original image file, form a full backup of the disk including both its original state after the initial backup plus any changes made thereafter via the latest differential file.

NB – Unlike an incremental backup which requires the initial backup file plus all incremental files to be complete (and usable), a differential backup (as seen here) requires only the original image file and the latest differential file to be considered usable.

Once complete, the “Backup Changes” module will inform of the success of the operation, the verification result (if this was requested during configuration) and even show the number of sectors skipped given this operation only focuses on new or different data.