Best USB Clone Tool to Copy and Transfer Your Files & OS
Quick Navigation:
- In need of USB clone tool
- Best USB clone tool for Windows 11/10/8/7
- How to clone USB drive (even boot drive)
- The End
“Looking for a reliable and easy-to-use USB clone tool… I have 2 USB sticks in hand and I’d like to clone one of the USB (bootable) to the other (newly purchased) for upgrading. Is there any easy way to accomplish? I’m not so familiar with computer knowledge, so… Thanks in advance.”
In need of USB clone tool
A USB flash drive or pen drive can be used for a lot of things. It allows you to keep important files outside of operating system, run portable version of programs and games, create Windows recovery disk, create Windows installation media, try open-source operating system, etc.
As it is cheap and convenient, many users have one or more USB drives for a certain purpose, and in some cases, a USB clone tool is in need to create an intact copy of the USB for backup or migration:
▪ Copy your USB drive as a backup: Since USB drives are small and light, they are easily lost. And with numerous times of plug-in and plug-out, your USB drive can get poor connection, or infected by virus from a computer. To avoid unwantted data loss, you can keep a USB duplication as backup.
▪ Clone a bootable USB drive for migration: Cloning is different from just copying and pasting the files from one to another. Simply copying may skip some crucial files, causing portable programs corrupted or OS unbootable. A USB drive clone can migrate everything to another drive without affecting the original functionality.
▪ Disk maintenance and upgrades: Users may seek to upgrade their USB drives to larger capacities or replace damaged drives without losing data. Also, when some of the USB hard drive failure symptoms occur, we should clone this drive to another good working USB drive just in case.
Then, how to duplicate a USB drive, especially a boot drive? It seems easy to copy files from USB to another USB via copy and paste. However, it only works when your USB is just a data storage device.
If your USB is a bootable drive, you can't copy and paste the master boot record (MBR) and other boot-related files; And if your USB drive contains huge amounts of data, the copy process can get lengthy and problematic.
In these cases, an adequate USB clone software is what you need.
Best USB clone tool for Windows 11/10/8/7
To make sure all the data on the USB drive successfully cloned to another, you need to use a professional USB disk clone tool. That is when Qiling Disk Master Professional comes into play.
It is a reliable utility that allows you to clone or backup bootable USB drive or other kinds of USB disks to different places such as another USB drive or internal hard drive.
▶ If you want an exact copy of the original USB drive, you can use the sector by sector clone option to even clone the unused space.
▶ The default intelligent-sector cloning mode empowers you to copy only used sectors, and therefore allows for cloning larger drive to a smaller drive without the need to shrink the source drive.
▶ If your bootable USB does not work, you can create a bootable media with a USB drive or CD/DVD on another computer with Windows installed. It works as a boot drive to boot your computer into WinPE.
▶ This USB drive clone tool works on any Windows computer, including Windows 11/10/8.1/8/7/Vista/XP.
Before you start, please download and install the software:
*If your computer is running Windows Server 2022/2019/2016/2012/etc. you may use the Server edition.
How to clone USB drive (even boot drive)
Whether you want to upgrade your USB drive or make multiple bootable USB drives, you can use Qiling Disk Master to clone your USB drive. You do not need to pay extra effort on the boot-related files, because this software takes care of it all.
To clone a USB flash drive with Qiling Disk Master:
✍Note: All the data on the target drive will be overwritten during cloning. You’d better create a backup in advance if there is something important.
Step-by-step tutorial to clone USB bootable drive:
1. Install Qiling Disk Master on a working Windows 11/10/8/7 computer. Connect two USB drives to this computer, the source drive and the destination drive.
2. Open Qiling Disk Master. Click Clone and select Disk Clone. Disk Clone will clone all the data on this drive including hidden partitions.
💬Tips: If you need to only clone one partition on this USB drive, you can select Partition Clone. If you want to clone your system to one USB drive, you can choose System Clone.
3. Select the bootable USB flash drive that you want to clone as the source disk and specify another USB drive as the destination disk to receive the clone. You can also clone USB drive to an SSD or HDD.
4. Confirm information and click Proceed to start cloning bootable USB drive.
✍Notes:
👉 If you are trying to clone USB drive to an SSD, check SSD Alignment to get better performance.
👉 Click Edit Partitions to resize partitions on the destination disk if needed.
- Copy without resizing partitions: It will not resize the partition size.
- Add unused space to all partitions: It will reallocate the unallocated space to each partition of the target disk, appropriate for the disk size.
- Manually adjust partition size: It allows you to extend unallocated space to any partition on the destination disk you want.
👉 The Sector By Sector Clone is not available when you trying to clone to a smaller drive. If you check it, the option Edit Partitions becomes unavailable.
While cloning USB bootable drive in Windows 11/10/8/7, you can still use your computer to do other things, and you can even edit the files in the USB drive that you are cloning.
Qiling Disk Master not only works as a USB clone tool but also a USB image tool. You can also use it to create USB drive image backup. And it's also a M.2 SSD cloner, thus you can use it to migrate Windows 10 to M.2 SSD, clone M.2 SSD to M.2 SSD, etc.
The End
To clone USB flash drive to another USB drive or HDD/SSD, USB clone tool is essential. A good tool can make things easier. And here, we recommend you Qiling Disk Master.
It can help you clone USB flash drive, even a bootable USB. And it offers you some features, such as, “Edit Partitions” and “SSD Alignment”, which can reduce unnecessary trouble. Download Qiling Disk Master and try it for yourself.
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