What Is Hot Clone? How to Clone Your Disk in This Method?

Hot cloning and cold cloning: Which cloning method to choose? This article will answer you the difference between hot cloning and cold cloning and guide you on how to do hot cloning in a physical machine or VMware.

Comparison between hot and cold clones

For greater storage space or faster read and write speeds, you can choose to buy a larger SSD as your PC's system disk. It is a good idea to clone the current hard drive or migrate the system as it avoids reinstalling the operating system.

There are two main cloning methods: hot cloning and cold cloning. Which method is better for you? This article will explain in detail the difference between hot cloning and cold cloning to help you make your choices.

What is hot cloning?

Hot cloning, also known as online cloning or real-time cloning, is created when the machine runs the operating system. This means that this method does not interfere with the workflow, as the physical server remains active during the migration.

Hot cloning is more advantageous due to lower costs, considering the productivity losses caused by staff and managers due to downtime.

What is cold cloning?

Cold clones require your computer to be offline and you need to shut down and restart the computer to complete the migration process. To ensure the final success, the machine needs to enter boot CD or Windows PE mode.

In short, the main difference between these two cloning methods is whether the PC needs to be restarted during the cloning process. Hot cloning is better than cold cloning, let's explore how to perform hot cloning in Windows 11/10.

Hot cloning software: MiniTool ShadowMaker

If you want to effectively clone your hard drive with hot cloning, you can use professional hot cloning software such as MiniTool ShadowMaker. This tool can help you achieve twice the result with half the effort. It allows cloning HDD to SSD and moving Windows to another drive. Its disk cloning function also supports sector-level cloning.

Compatible with any disk brand, you can effectively clone WD/Samsung/Toshiba/Seagate/SanDisk hard disk to another disk in Windows 11/10. During this process, you can use your PC as usual. Once completed, the target disk can be used as a boot drive to boot the system.

You may wish to download and install MiniTool ShadowMaker to try it on a physical or virtual machine.

How to perform hot cloning

Steps to perform hot cloning using MiniTool ShadowMaker:

Step 1: Connect another hard drive to your computer, start the cloning software, and click "Continue to try".

Step 2: In the Tools tab, click Clone Disk in the right pane.

Step 3: Select your system disk as the source drive and use the connected hard drive as the target drive.

Step 4: When cloning the system disk, a pop-up window will appear asking you to register MiniTool ShadowMaker. After registration, the cloning process can be started without reinstalling the system.

Conclusion

Hot versus cold clono: Which method to choose depends on your actual situation. If you don't want to interrupt your work, try running hot clones with MiniTool ShadowMaker as described above.

By the way, in addition to cloning disks, you can also try using MiniTool ShadowMaker to ensure your PC is secure when it comes to file backups, partition backups, disk backups, system backups, and file synchronization.

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