I am looking for the best free software to clone a 240GB to 240GB SSD HDD, in order to attempt file recovery on the copy. The source drive is nowhere near full so the software needs to clone only the data & exclude empty space.

if you need to recovery a damaged or deleted files, then you need to do sector-by-sector copy. DMDE is an appropriate utility for that. Therefore, the option to copy only part of the disk (240GB) will not work. You have to copy the whole source disk.

There are free cloning tools that will only clone the used portion of a drive, but they will all pretty much fail if there are any bad sectors. Clonezilla is one I use on good drives, but as stated it is not feasible for use on a failing drive meant for recovery. The only possible option I can think of is to use ddrescue to do the cloning using a domain file created with ddru_ntfsbitmap (part of ddrutility), but that will only work for partitions that are NTFS. It has also been mentioned that partclone is capable of producing a ddrescue style domain file for recovery, but I have never tested it.

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I forgot to add that I agree with sandy_t that you should clone the whole drive for the best possible chance of recovering files, although I have never used DMDE myself. The options I mentioned are complicated to perform and all require using Linux, but you did ask for something free to clone only the used portion of a drive for recovery purposes.

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Home of HDDSuperClone

DMDE has several options under the Parameters tab. These allow the user to specify how DMDE should handle timeouts and I/O errors.

For example, the user can specify the number of retries, whether to ignore I/O errors, jump over X sectors after error, and read back after jump. One can also specify different fillers for bad and skipped sectors. Of course many of these options make no sense for SSDs.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.