Before You Clone Your Phone
Back up your Android device using Android backup tools or system backup, or back up your iOS device using iCloud. You should also back up specific data you’re concerned about losing, such as family photos, on a separate service, just to ensure nothing crucial is lost. If all you want to do is keep a complete version of the data on your phone, you can use these to load your data onto a new device. You may need to ask your carrier for a new SIM card, however. Contact their customer service department to discuss their policy. To clone your phone, you’ll need:
Your current deviceThe device you want to clone your phone ontoA PC or Mac
Clone an iPhone With Dr. Fone
Dr.Fone offers tools that let you completely copy your phone to another device, or wipe data off a phone completely.
Use Cloneit on Android Phones
CLONEit simplifies the process even further; all you need to clone from one phone to the other is the software on both phones and a Wi-Fi connection for the two phones to share. Just set one phone to send data and the other to receive, and you’re all set. Once the process is complete, open the new device and see if everything transferred properly. If you find data has been corrupted, replace it with the backup tools, and enjoy your new phone.
What Is Phone Cloning Anyway?
Phone cloning is copying the data and identity of one cell phone to another. Cloning can either be a backup of the entire phone, or it can just be the key identifiers of your phone. In the early days of mobile phones, when they were little more than radios, intercepting the signal often made cloning a simple prospect. All a hacker needed to do was tune in your phone on a ham radio and listen for the identifier. It’s more difficult on modern phones, in part because phones now use SIM cards, which come loaded with a secret code. This makes cloning your phone’s identifiers, especially without plugging into it, much harder but not impossible.
Why People Clone Their Phones
Copying a phone’s identifying data is generally illegal across the world but, despite the technical and legal issues, people generally do it for a handful of perfectly legal reasons, with the two most common being the ability to retain the features of a phone or to share a phone with somebody in their household without paying for a second line. Some also believe this makes their phone untraceable, but that’s just folklore. Each device has a unique radio fingerprint, and just by the nature of how it functions, it can easily be tracked. These laws don’t apply, it should be noted, to your phone’s software or any data you put on your phone, such as photos you take, as duplicating that data won’t allow another phone to listen in on your calls or share your number. Copying and transferring that data may be frowned on by your carrier or the phone manufacturer, and may violate terms of service or end-user license agreements (EULAs), but it’s generally allowed, if for no other reason than it’s usually difficult for these entities to track.
