Effective system management is essential to run a company well. One particular way to make your system management more efficient is through the use of disk cloning. It’s useful because it allows your company to manage data quickly and easily. An employee is able to set computers to all the same settings once and this drastically cuts down the management time. There exist special tools to make this system work for example R-Drive Image, which can run without complicated installation or instructions.
The Benefits
The advantages of using R-Drive Image are multi-fold, as it provides a friendly interface with simple instructions for quickly copying data from one disk to another but also allows powerful scripting to clone disks automatically in a scheduled fashion. No sophisticated coding or scripting experience is necessary to master the tool as most of the work is done internally. As opposed to other software that provides this service, R-Drive Image supports both master boot record as well as non-MBR disk cloning.
How to Use R-Drive Image
Cloning a disk is quite simple. Below are the basic steps for cloning one disk to another. First of all, make sure R-Drive Image is installed. If you have not yet downloaded it, you may find it on the official website. Follow the installation steps and once the program is ready to go proceed to the next steps.
Connect the Disks to the Computer
Both the source and destination disk should be connected to the same computer onto which the software is installed. Once both are connected, launch R-Drive Image.
Select the Action
Once the tool has been launched, you will notice several options. These will include creating an Image, restoring from an Image, copying a disk to another disk, connecting an Image as a virtual logical disk, creating a startup disk, checking an Image file, and scheduling or creating a script. Each of these actions can be useful for productive system management, but in this article we will be examining disk cloning, so select the “Copy a Disk to another Disk” option. Click the Next button to continue once you’ve made the selection.
Select the Location of The Source and Target Disk
R-Drive Image should now bring you to the object selection panel. This panel will guide you to choose a source disk, i.e. the disk you would like to clone to the target or destination disk, and then the target disk itself. Once both of the disks are properly connected, the object selection panel will show all the disk information. Be extra careful to select the correct disk for cloning and the location to which it should be cloned to. Once you have double checked that the information is correct, click the Next button to proceed to choosing the cloning procedure.
Select the Cloning Type
You should now be in the restore or copy parameter panel. In this step, you will have to choose one of the four options available. You may choose a raw disk copy, a copy of all partitions onto the original places, one partition to another, or expand/shrink the partition to the whole disk. If you would like to create an exact clone of the source disk, select the raw disk copy option. This option will clone the source disk identically, including any white space if it exists. This process is slightly slower however the tool will clone the source disk such that every bit is equivalent. After choosing the option, click the Next button to begin the cloning process.
Cloning
You should now see a processing panel where R-Drive Image is about to clone the source disk to the target. This allows you to see every little detail about the disk including the operations being taken. Make sure you verify the details and actions to be sure it is complete and correct. In the case that something is off, for example if you would like to add an action, clock on the add another object option, then start the processing. Click the Start button and let R-Drive Image take care of the rest. By the end, you should have 2 identical disks from one Image.