In fact, several backup programs, including my current favorite for imaging and cloning, EaseUS ToDo Backup Free, allow you to make small incremental image backups, recording how the contents of the drive change day to day. Imaging makes more sense for backup, because you can put multiple image backups onto one sufficiently large external hard drive. Then you swap the old drive for the new one, and restore the image to the new drive. I suppose you might choose imaging if you don’t have either an extra bay or a USB/SATA adapter, but you do have an external drive with sufficient free space. Transferring OS from a sluggish system drive to a modern HDD/SSD will make a huge difference to the performance and responsiveness of your PC. You plug a third, spare drive into the PC and create the image file on it. Its with easy-to-use interface, this app is a fast, effective tool for quick drive copying. Disk Copy is a perfect tool for upgrading your operating system to a new, larger hard drive, or just making a quick clone of a drive full of files. Imaging, on the other hand, requires you to do all of that twice. EaseUS Disk Copy copies any disk or partition sector-by-sector for an exact copy of the original.

You plug in the new drive-either in a spare bay, or through a USB/SATA adapter-launch the cloning software, and do the job. If you’re moving to a new drive, cloning is the easier solution. If it’s the drive you boot from, only cloning or imaging can reliably make a working copy.

But you can’t just drag and drop an operating system. Why not just drag and drop? That’s fine for an unbootable drive.

Easeus disk copy sata