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Using True Image 2012 to clone existing OS

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I am considering using this product for one specific purpose:

I have partitioned a 64GB SSD, as a 29GB partition, and installed Windows 7.

My goal, is to clone this disk to a 32GB USB flash disk, thereby using as a bootable OS disk from the USB header.

I would like to know if the product will allow me to clone the existing SSD, to the USB flash disk.

1. Will it allow the clone of SSD to USB?
2. Will the size of the SSD be a problem. e.g: the disk is 64GB, but the OS partition is smaller. Will the software allow cloning just the partition, or must it clone the entire SSD, thusly causing a clone failure to a smaller (32GB) flash disk?

Any other recommendations welcome.

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My best advice for the future: Do not Clone!

There is rarely a need to Clone. Really, Backup is safer and more flexible. Many users encounter problems Cloning which they would not have if they has instead used Backup.

1. Don't use Clone. Do a full disk Backup, selecting the entire disk, and a Restore. The end result will be the same as Clone, but with many advantages.

2. Check out the many user guides and tutorials in the left column of this forum, particularly ATIH 2012 - Getting Started and Grover's True Image Guides which are illustrated with step-by-step screenshots.

A full disk backup, selecting the disk checkbox rather than individual partitions, includes everything. It includes everything that a clone would include.

The difference is that while a clone immediately writes that information a single time to another drive, a backup is saved as a compressed .tib archive. As such, multiple .tib archives may be saved to a single backup drive, allowing for greater redundancy, security and flexibility.

Once a full disk image .tib archive is restored to a drive, the result is the same as if that drive had been the target of a clone done on the date and time that the backup archive was created.

Clone is riskier because we've seen situations where users mistakenly choose the wrong drive to clone from and to, thus wiping out their system drive.

In your case, you would make a full disk backup. That would, of course, include the OS partition. Acronis True Image will backup only the sectors that are in use, so a 64 GB drive will not result in a 64 GB backup image.

As for creating a bootable USB flash drive that would boot to Windows, I don't think Acronis True Image can do that. This is a Windows limitation, not an Acronis issue. AFAIK, Windows does not allow itself to be booted from a USB flash drive. I think there are various solutions and hacks to enable this, but they're not part of core Windows.

Thank you for the reply.

From your comments, I have gleaned:

1. Using backup / restore of the OS will allow me to move to the USB as the OS device.
2. Using this method will alleviate any drive-size problems I was concerned with.
3. Bootable USB flash disk is questionable (this is understood -and I was not intending to put that expectation onto the Acronis software)
4. I'll review the referenced documentation in detail. My apologies for not doing so beforehand.

Sam,

To clarify, you can use the USB Flash drive to store your backup file (a TIB file) and make the USB bootable in the sense that when you boot on that Flash Drive you will be able to run ATI on Linux, but not to boot in WIndows.

The TIB file size is typically much smaller than the space taken by the Windows installation. A TIB file produced by a disk and partition backup contains an accurate image of the used sectors of the original disk, unless the user has checked the sector by sector option (not recommended). Additionally, the information is typically compressed (unless the user chose to have no compression during the backup settings). On a standard Windows installation your image could be only 30% of the size of the original data. When you add a lot of apps to your system disk, the percentage will increase (compression of .exe files is less efficient, so the benefits of compression decrease)

Thank you Pat,

If I were to take a backup of the existing SSD, I should be able to boot into ATI, and initiate a restore of that backup (image) to the USB drive, correct? This would accomplish what I'm looking for I believe.

Out of curiosity, is the (not recommended) sector by sector option a direct block-to-block copy from one disk to the other? Ala: "dd" in the UNIX world?

Many thanks for the responses.

You could restore that image to a USB drive, but as Tutle indicated above, it is virtually impossible to boot Windows from a USB device. So I am not sure what you would gain, instead of just keeping the image for future use.

In ATI, the sector by sector includes all sectors in the backup, including the ones that don't contain data per the filesystem. So, aside from compression, the resulting image is the same size as the entire disk. Using that feature is typically meaningless, except for disk forensics purposes, or when the file system cannot be trusted for some reason.

It is a bit confusing for users. Some guess that they need to check sector by sector to produce a backup that is sector-based. This is not correct. Whether the option is checked or not, a disk and partition backup is sector-based.