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What's the difference between cloning a hard drive and copying all the data (files and folders) from one drive to another? Is there invisible system data that you can't transfer?
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What's the difference between cloning a hard drive and copying all the data (files and folders) from one drive to another? Is there invisible system data that you can't transfer?
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Several differences:
If you are not copying the current OS disk, but only data: only the speed is relevant - coying is still much slower.
1This answer is wrong since it seems to presume that the OP means a Windows file copy (without declaring this assumption). Also an answer that explains the difference between X and Y by repeatedly explaining that "X does Y" (i.e. "cloning copies ...") needs a larger vocabulary. – sawdust – 2018-07-10T02:38:11.437
2Also cloning makes the drive bootable and file copy does not. – Moab – 2018-07-12T21:38:09.673
1Your question is vague and poorly worded because there are many ways to "copy" a "drive". For instance Linux provides many methods for "copying all the data", including
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
for copying an entire physical drive sector by sector. – sawdust – 2018-07-10T02:28:51.3072cloning is the same as imaging, which stores the whole drive's state instead of visible files. Copying the drive using
dd
is a simple form of creating a drive image – phuclv – 2018-07-10T03:11:06.280