How to Create an Image of Your USB Drive in Windows 11/10/8/7

Creating an image of your USB drive could be an important thing. It is useful for duplicating a USB drive or backing up contents on USB drive to keep data safe.

Lily

by Lily Updated on July 20, 2023

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Create an image of USB drive instead of copy the files only

USB drive is a kind of storage device. It is tiny and portable so that lots of users use USB drive to store their data, like personal files, documents, photos, and so on. In case of data loss, you may want to duplicate the data on your USB drive, and for this, simply copying the files from USB drive to your computer would satisfy you.

However, if your USB drive is bootable, or there is more than one partition on the USB drive, copying files only would not help a lot, and the best way is to create an image of your USB drive.

Creating an image of your USB drive has a great meaning to you. Imaging USB flash drive will make an exact copy of your USB drive, which includes the master boot record. You can use the new USB drive with the copied data without the restoration process.

Preparations for making an image of USB drive

To create an image of USB drive is to make an exact copy of your USB drive. Before that, you need to prepare something for it.

1. Prepare a new USB drive to store the image. It should be large enough to store data on the USB drive you want to copy. If you are going to copy every byte of your old USB, the target USB drive should be as large as the source drive at least.

2. The cloning process will delete data on the target drive, so you’d better backup the new USB drive first if there is important data on it.

3. Find a USB clone tool, like AOMEI Backupper, so that you can create an image of USB drive easily and simply.

How to create an image of USB drive

Here will show you the specific steps for how to create an image of USB drive with AOMEI Backupper.

Step 1. Plug in the USB drives to your computer, install and launch AOMEI Backupper. To create an image of USB drive, here you need click Clone -> Disk Clone.

Disk Clone

Step 2. Then, select the USB drive which you want to create image of as the source disk.

Select Old USB

Step 3. Here, select the new USB drive as the destination disk. You can also create an image of USB drive to another place like local hard drive, or other external hard drives if you like.

Select New USB

Note: It will pop out a window to tell you that the existing partitions on the destination disk will be overwritten or deleted. Click OK to continue as we have made a backup during the preparation process.

Step 4. Last, confirm the information, if there is no problem, click Start Clone, and it will execute immediately.

Preview Start Clone

Note: If you would like to copy all sectors on the source USB whether they are used or not, tick the box in front of “Sector by sector clone”.

Conclusion

With the help of AOMEI Backupper, creating image of USB drive in Windows 7/8/10 becomes a simple case. Besides, you can use it to backup USB drive, create a bootable USB drive, etc. It should be the best USB image tool.

Lily
Lily · Editor
Lily Green joined AOMEI in 2018 and has since become a professional in the areas of data protection and data transfer. She is committed to helping users protect their precious computer data and troubleshoot Windows system errors. She consistently stays vigilant about the latest trends in technology, guaranteeing that the given information aligned with the ongoing advancements in the field.