By Delia / Last update November 1, 2022

Someone may think it’s easy to transfer files from USB to another USB via “Copy and Paste”. It’s useful if your USB is just a data storage device. However, it’s cumbersome and time-consuming. More so, if your USB is a bootable device, that does not work. You cannot copy and paste the master boot record (MBR) and other files connected to secure boot your computer. And here, a question come out: how to protect your data on the USB drive?

The experienced users may choose to clone USB flash drive with a USB clone tool. Why clone USB drive? Is it able to ensure data security and secure boot?

Why do you need to clone USB drive?

A USB flash drive or pen drive can be used for a lot of things. It allows you to:

  • run portable version of programs and games,
  • create Windows recovery disk,
  • create Windows installation media,
  • try open-source operating system, etc.

As it is cheap and convenient, many users have one or more USB drives for a certain purpose. Here comes an example:

“Looking for a reliable and easy-to-use USB clone tool… I have two USB sticks in hand and I’d like to clone one of the USB (bootable) to the other (newly purchased) for upgrading. Is there any easy way to accomplish? I’m not so familiar with computer knowledge, so… Thanks in advance.”

USB Clone Tool

Since USB drives are very small, they are inclined to go missing. What’s more, with lots of times of plug-in and plug-out, your USB drive can get infected by virus from a virus affected computer. To avoid data loss in these unexpected events, you can clone your USB drive as a backup copy.

A clone is different from just copying and pasting the files from one to another. Simply copying files may skip some crucial files, ending up the portable program corrupted or OS unbootable. A USB drive clone is much safer and quicker than just copy and paste. If you clone a bootable USB drive, the cloned one will remain bootable.

When you see one of the USB hard drive failure symptoms, you should clone this drive to another good working USB drive to replace it. You can never be more careful about your data, so it is always a good practice to have a backup or clone of your USB drive.

Best USB duplication software for Windows 11/10/8/7

To make sure all the data on the USB drive successfully cloned to another, you need to use a professional USB disk clone tool. That is when AOMEI Backupper Professional comes into play. It is a reliable utility that allows you to clone or backup bootable USB drive or other kinds of USB disks to different places such as another USB drive or internal hard drive.

◑ If you want an exact copy of the original USB drive, you can use the Sector by sector clone option to even clone the unused space.
◑ You can clone USB bootable drive from large capacity to a smaller drive without the need to shrink the source drive.
◑ If your bootable USB does not work, you still have a chance to create a bootable media with a USB flash drive or CD/DVD on another computer with the same hardware. It works as boot drive, which allows you to boot your computer.
◑ This USB flash drive clone tool works on any Windows computer, including Windows 7/8/10/11/XP/Vista.

How to clone bootable USB drive (with a step-by-step guide)?

Whether you want to upgrade your USB drive or make multiple bootable USB drives, you can use AOMEI Backupper to clone your bootable drive. You do not need to pay extra effort on the bootable drive, because this software takes care of it all. Before you start, please download the software. If your computer is running Windows Server 2022/2019/2016/2012 or other server systems, you need to use AOMEI Backupper Server.

Download DemoWin11/10/8.1/8/7/XP
Secure Download

To clone a USB flash drive with AOMEI Backupper:

◉ Note: All the data on the destination will be overwritten when the clone starts. Thus, you’d better create a backup if there is something important.

Step-by-step tutorial to clone USB bootable drive:

1. Install AOMEI Backupper on a working Windows 11/10/8/7 computer. Connect two USB drives to this computer, the source drive and the destination drive.

2. Open AOMEI Backupper. Click Clone and select Disk Clone. Disk Clone will clone all the data on this drive including hidden partitions.

Disk Clone

✿ Tip:  If you need to only clone one partition on this USB drive, you can select Partition Clone. If you want to clone your system to one USB drive, you can choose System Clone.

3. Select the bootable USB flash drive that you want to clone as the source disk and specify another USB drive as the destination disk to receive the clone. You can also clone USB drive to an SSD or HDD.

Destination Disk

4. Confirm information and click Start Clone to start cloning bootable USB drive.

Start Clone

Notes:

👉 If you are trying to clone USB drive to an SSD, check SSD Alignment to get better performance.

👉 Click Edit Partitions to resize partitions on the destination disk if needed. 

  • Copy without resizing partitions: It will not resize the partition size.
  • Add unused space to all partitions: It will reallocate the unallocated space to each partition of the target disk, appropriate for the disk size.
  • Manually adjust partition size: It allows you to extend unallocated space to any partition on the destination disk you want. 

Add Unused Space

👉 The Sector by sector clone is not available when you trying to clone to a smaller drive. If you check it, the option Edit Partitions becomes unavailable.

While cloning USB bootable drive in Windows 11/10/8/7, you can still use your computer to do other things, and you can even edit the files in the USB drive that you are cloning.

AOMEI Backupper can not only be regarded as a USB clone tool but also as a USB image tool. You can also use it to create USB drive image backup. And it can still be a M.2 SSD cloner, thus you can use it to migrate Windows 10 to M.2 SSD, clone M.2 SSD to M.2 SSD, etc.

The End

To clone USB flash drive to another USB drive or HDD/SSD, USB clone tool is essential. A good tool can make things become easier. And here, we recommend you AOMEI Backupper.

It can help you clone USB flash drive, even a bootable USB. And it offers you some features, such as, “Edit Partitions” and “SSD Alignment”, which can reduce unnecessary trouble. Download AOMEI Backupper and try it for yourself.