System Clone vs Disk Clone – Which One Is Suitable for You - MiniTool

What is a disk clone or system clone? It is easy to confuse these two different clones for some users. So, which one should you choose between disk clone and system clone to figure out the differences between those two types, this article about system clone vs disk clone on MiniTool Website will give you more information.

What Are the System Clone and Disk Clone?

To compare system clone to disk clone, you need to figure out some definitions here.

What is a clone? To perform a clone, you normally need to resort to dedicated software or hardware to create a copy of the target. Different from a disk image that requires you to restore a disk image before you can use it directly, a disk clone means that you can directly use it after the operation.

What is a system clone?

A system clone is a copy of the original operating system. It is related to the system partition and system-related partitions that will be transferred in the system cloning.

What is a disk clone?

A disk clone is a copy of the whole disk, which means all the data in that drive will be copied to another drive, including systems, applications, files, and documents.

So, what are the differences between disk clones and system clones?

System Clone VS Disk Clone

According to what we have introduced to the above two clone types, you can easily tell that the main difference is their copy target. System clone only servers for system-related parts but disk clone for the whole disk.

Normally, people would like to choose a disk clone when they need to upgrade the disk to a larger one without reinstalling OS. Disk clone won’t lose any data exiting in your drive and all of that can be transferred.

Related article: Top 4 Hard Drive Repair Solutions to Fix Hard Drive Windows 10

Since there are two disks with the same signature, one disk will be marked as offline and you need to remove it.

Disparately, a system clone can be your first choice if you would like to move your operating system to another disk and, at the same time, the original hard drive will be kept in your computer.

So, these two different clone types are applied in different circumstances and you can choose them tailored to your situations.

Two Recommendations for Disk Clone & System Clone

After the introduction to disk clone vs system clone, there are two excellent clone wizards that are worth trying.

MiniTool ShadowMaker

MiniTool ShadowMaker is free backup software. Apart from the backup feature, it has many tools to enrich users’ experience, such as clone disk, media builder, data sync, remote backup, etc.

To use the Clone Disk feature, you need to download and install the program and open to click Keep Trial to enjoy the 30-day free version.

Then in the Tools tab where Clone Disk can be found here, choose your source disk and target disk to start the process.

Pay attention to the warning messages that will notify you that the data on the target disk will be destroyed, so you need to perform a data backup in advance.

MiniTool Partition Wizard

Another tool is MiniTool Partition Wizard. It is a professional disk partition manager. At the same, this tool can satisfy the demands for both disk clones and system clones.

Please download and install the program by clicking the following button and when done, open the program to click Migrate OS to SSD/HD Wizard in the toolbar and then you can see there are two options for you:

• Option A: It can copy all the partitions on the system disk.
• Option B: It can only move the operating system to another hard disk.

Please choose the one you need to perform a disk clone or system clone.

Bottom Line:

This article is about system clone vs disk clone and we have clarified the differences between them both. If you have any other questions, welcome to leave your comments.

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