How to clone Hard drive to USB external partition storage

Hi there,

When you clone a drive, it copies sector by sector everything on that drive to another drive. It doesn't make any difference if you have 1 or several partitions on the drive, it will clone everything over to the new drive and overwrite everything on the target drive. Some data transfer programs will proportion the partition sizes to match the size of the target drive. But you can't clone just a partition, it clones the physical drive.

You can image a partition of one drive to another for storage or backUp, like the Win-7 builtIn imaging applet does automatically.

Or you can BackUp Files, or Folders, or a whole drive to another, either uncompressed or compressed.

One good source to understand the differences is to download the Acronic True Image 2011 Manual to read or review
Here is the link to download it.

http://www.acronis.com/support/documentation/index.html

Hope that's helpful

Clonezilla.org will do this and it's free.

You need to be a little more specific. You can put the one .img file on each destination partition, but as john_vankirk stated, you can't restore an image file to a partition, but have to select a drive to restore to.

Good morning. I believe that both answers from Mr. John_Vankirk and Mr. or Ms. Hello2012 are both valid. What Mr. John said is very correct and true since I experienced it myself but it was not what I asked for . On the other hand answer of hello2012 works fine and I tried it and it is fine. I do not know which one I have to pick as the best answer since each has a valid points but hello2012 answered my question. Thanks to both of them and also your website.
My Best Regards to all
BG Ebrahimi

Best answer selected by BGGW.

Thank you and I will use it.