You must have created an exact image of your Windows or any bootable cd, but how about creating an image of a USB drive? Why do you need it? We often create many disks for Windows on a USB drive, and if it goes corrupt, you need to start over. While copy-paste works fine for USB drivers with only files and folders, bootable USB drives need to get cloned bit by bit. In this post, we will show how you can create an exact copy of a USB drive or clone it.
Why Is Creating a Clone of A USB Drive Essential?
Backup. It is that simple. While there are a lot of backup solutions, these tools create a clone of the SSD or USB drive and save it anywhere you want. You can create another USB drive or save the image to restore it later. Apart from this, USB drives are prone to corruption. I am sure you have seen the message where it says, “Drive unrecognized.” An image file or a physical cloned drive ensures you have the data when things go wrong.
Creating an image has another advantage. You can copy it to as many USB drives as you wish without the source device. It comes in very handy when you want to create another Windows 10 Bootable USB drive.
How to create an exact copy of a USB drive or Clone it
While creating a clone of a bootable USB drive is one thing, creating a replica of a drive with a lot of data is also helpful. Let’s say you have multiple USB ports, and you want to copy data from one to another. A tool can work better than a simple copy-paste operation. Here are a few tools to create a clone USB drive and the data on the drive.
1] USB Image Tool
Once you extract the tool, double-click on the USB Image Tool file to launch it. Plug the USB drive, and it will be listed under Drives. You have some standard options here, which include Restore, Backup, Reset, and Rescan.
Since you are using this for the first time, click on backup. It will prompt you to save it as an image file. Next, change the USB drive and use the restore option to copy the exact files or create a clone of the original drive.
USB Image tool also offers a lot of options, such as
- Ignore size checks for gzip images (devices larger than 4 GiB can be saved to and restored from compressed image files)
- Create MD5 checksums during backup (hashing is done for the uncompressed image file)
- Custom names to backup according to (tags: %n – device number, %x – device name, %s – device serial, %ds – date, %ts – time)
- Fix GPTafter restore.
- Define buffer size and more.
Then you can save these settings to the registry, so next time, you need not configure all of them again. It will also help you to perform clone USB to USB cloning.
2] EaseUS Todo backup
It’s a free backup tool from EaseUS that can create a clone or backup of the USB drive. It offers a modern interface, which I like most about it. Once you download and install the Todo backup, follow the steps to clone or copy USB drives.
- Open EaseUS Todo Backup and click on the clone icon on the left side.
- Select the USB drive from which you want to create a copy.
- Choose the destination USB drive where you want to copy it.
- Wait for the process to complete.
- It will clone the USB flash drive
One of the most significant advantages of using this tool is the ability to copy from one USB drive to another without creating an image, a.k .a. duplicate USB drive. While it’s wise to create an image, it works best if you want to copy everything.
While the USB Image tool strictly works for USB drives, you can use the Todo Backup tool to create a backup of hard drive partitions.
Download from the EaseUS official page.
I hope both of these tools were easy to use and if you were wondering how to clone a USB drive to another USB drive, then you can use these tools to backup, copy, or create a clone of the USB drive on Windows 11, Windows 10 and other versions of Windows.
