Clone vs copy a data drive?

I have a 1 TB suspect (SMART C5 error)data drive (Y:) that I want to replace with a new 4TB drive. Both will be NTFS on a Windows 10 PC.

The drive had just data, including my Windows 10 user profile and associated Documents, Pictures etc.directories.

Aloke, make a full disk & partitions backup of your suspect 1TB drive Y: regardless of the method you use later.  This will tell you whether ATI can read all of the data from the drive or whether it will hit any bad sectors etc.  If a disk & partitions backup encounters problems, then try doing a Files & Folders backup instead.

Given that you have moved your user profile to this drive, along with your documents, pictures etc, then I would recommend using Backup & Recovery instead of using Cloning.  Backup is more tolerant of disk / file system errors than cloning is, plus with cloning you would have both drives connected at the same time, whereas using Recovery, you can protect your original drive from any further stress or damage while you restore your data to the new drive, which you can ensure is given the same drive letter Y: as used by the old one and needed for your profile to work correctly.

You will need to use the Acronis Rescue Media to boot your computer and perform the restore unless you have another user profile setup which has not been moved from its default location on your C: OS drive.

Using the bootable recovery media to perform this operation is the best way to do it.  As Steve suggests make a full disk backup of the drive first for insurance that your data is intact.

I also move user data to other drives and have moved entire user profiles to other drives via sysprep and registry edits.  I have used True Image to clone these drives as well as the OS drives that are associated with them with complete success many times.

Your basic idea in your Method 1 above along with using recover media to perform the clone works.

Thanks for the replies.

Let me list the steps as I understand it.

1) Backup my data, currently on a 1 TB (suspect) Y: internal drive. Already done once using the ATI rescue media. I backed up the suspect drive to my QNAP NAS.  Went successfully, as far as I can tell.  No error messages.

Note: I ran a boot time CHKDSK (or whatever it is called now in Win 10) on Y:.  It recovered some files.  HD Tune has marked 3 LBA blocks as bad. I am doing EVERYTHING with ATI2019 using the Rescue media.  I haven't installed the Windows GUI yet.  No need.

2) Insert the new 4 TB drive into the USB dock.

2) Boot from rescue media

3) Create a single primary partition on the new 4 TB drive. [Can I assign letterY: to it? see Q below]

3) Backup 1 TB suspect Y: drive [to what destination? NAS? Does it matter?

4) Restore to new 4 TB drive

5) Shutdown PC. Remove old 1 TB Y: drive, Replace with the 4 TB drive (which now has all the data on it).

Question: The new 4 TB drive should be assigned the letter Y: for Windows to find my data, right? Should it have the same label as well?

Will I be able to assign this new 4TB drive the desired drive letter at step 3 above (booted from rescue media)?

As Steve suggested, this is using Backup and Recovery and not cloning.

Aloke

Aloke Prasad wrote:

Thanks for the replies.

Let me list the steps as I understand it.

1) Backup my data, currently on a 1 TB (suspect) Y: internal drive. Already done once using the ATI rescue media. I backed up the suspect drive to my QNAP NAS.  Went successfully, as far as I can tell.  No error messages.

Note: I ran a boot time CHKDSK (or whatever it is called now in Win 10) on Y:.  It recovered some files.  HD Tune has marked 3 LBA blocks as bad. I am doing EVERYTHING with ATI2019 using the Rescue media.  I haven't installed the Windows GUI yet.  No need.

2) Insert the new 4 TB drive into the USB dock.

2) Boot from rescue media

3) Create a single primary partition on the new 4 TB drive. [Can I assign letterY: to it? see Q below] Yes, you can assign the drive letter Y at this time if you wish. (See Q answer below)

3) Backup 1 TB suspect Y: drive [to what destination? NAS? Does it matter? You can use any destination that has sufficient space except the new drive Y (4 TB in this case).

4) Restore to new 4 TB drive

5) Shutdown PC. Remove old 1 TB Y: drive, Replace with the 4 TB drive (which now has all the data on it).

Question: The new 4 TB drive should be assigned the letter Y: for Windows to find my data, right? Should it have the same label as well?  Yes, Windows will expect to find your data in drive letter Y.  The label is for your convenience.

Will I be able to assign this new 4TB drive the desired drive letter at step 3 above (booted from rescue media)? You could by using the command prompt window however, doing so may prove difficult for your skill level.  It can be done after the recovery process is complete using Windows Disk Management which is very easy.  Just make sure that the old drive Y is not attached to the computer so that the Y letter is available for assignment.

As Steve suggested, this is using Backup and Recovery and not cloning.

Aloke

 

" Will I be able to assign this new 4TB drive the desired drive letter at step 3 above (booted from rescue media)? You could by using the command prompt window however, doing so may prove difficult for your skill level.  It can be done after the recovery process is complete using Windows Disk Management which is very easy. "

You are suggesting that the drive letter assignment be done after starting up in Win 10 and using Disk Manager.

Will Windows be Ok starting up and not finding a Y: drive? My User profile is on Y: Won't Windows be expecting to se a Y drive on startup? I'll assign that letter once in Windowes.

Also, Step 3 above (creating partition and formatting the target 4 TB new drive: Can this be done when booted from ATI Rescue disk? Just checking ...

With regards to the partitioning and formatting of the new drive the recovery operation will do that for you without your intervention.

In my experience in the moving of the User Profile.  Windows keeps a profile for all user accounts including a default profile for Windows itself.  The user profile in question here is your own account profile.  Your profile will be broken until the Y drive becomes available.  So once you assign the letter to the new drive then your profile and data will become available.

You can verify this in Windows Explorer and see your user profile and Windows default profile.  Navigate to C:\Windows, locate the Users folder and expand it.  You will see all User Account Profiles.

bottom line is that Windows will startup just fine even with you user profile being broken because the default is active just like it is when you first install Windows prior to creating any user accounts.

You can format a disk in the Acronis rescue media.  Personally, i think it's easier if you do it in Windows if you're able to though.  It works fine in the Acronis rescue media, but make sure you have the right disk selected as it will go when you say to, and if you have the wrong one selected (be careful that it may have a different drive letter in the rescue media than Windows!!!!!).

You can't assign a drive letter in the rescue media either as it won't carry over to the booted Windows OS later on.  Most likely, you'll need to do it after you boot the OS.  The good news though... is when you restore the disk backup, you can tell it to recover MBR and track 0 which should keep the original disk information so when you remove the old one (before you boot back into Windows) it should hopefully consider it as the same drive in the OS and retain the previous drive letter of the old disk.

If for some reason it does not, most likely it will either create a temp profile on C and then you'd have to manually assign it as Y in Windows after the boot - just make sure the old drive is disconnected so it has the opportunity to try and use Y in its place.

https://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/ATI2019/index.html#…

Another note (after looking at Enchantech's)... as another possibility - just in case...

You could create a new admin account that stays assigned on C: originally and make it admin (just in case).  Worse case, with that, you could take care of assigning the new drive as Y: from there, then reboot and attempt to log back in with your regular account.  If all goes well, then delete the temp admin account after that.  

Bobbo,

The user will not have an MBR and Track 0 to recover as he is working on a data only disk.  I have been running machine with the user profile moved to other drives for the better part of the last 15 years and I can tell you that if you lose a data drive with a user profile Windows will start and run just fine until you try to access any of your data.  The reason is that even though your profile has been moved your user account remains in/on drive C.  All that is accomplished by moving the user profile is the relocating of user data.  This is a practice of users running small SSD's for the Windows System disk so that 1 writes to the SSD are limited and 2 that the OS drive does not become filled with user data.  I still use the technique for the later purpose. 

Roger that Enchantech and thanks for the refresher!

Yeah, I seem to remember the same behavior now that I think about it.  Been a long while since I moved profiles from the default and the behavior escapes me, but yeah, it basically just creates a Junction point for the user directories like My Documents, My Music, etc so it makes sense that the profile would load fine, but you'd be missing your data as it would be junctioned to a location that currently doesn't exist until it is updated with the disk drive letter of Y: again.

I've recently been playing with O365 and found that it does the same if you tell it to auto backup the user profile - it was super confusing at first as the O365 "desktop"actually lives in C:\users\profile\0365\desktop, yet, the original desktop location still exists on the user profile (as does things like "My documents").  However, it doesn't make a new "downloads" folder and the "Quick Access" links don't all get updated. On the front end of the GUI, it looks like it's still the same, but not really.  Go figure, Microsoft!

Thanks all for posting.

This is exactly my situation!

I have the following drives:

C: a small SSD (250 GB) with Windows on it. I try to not install anything else on it.

U: a 4 TB Backup disk. I use this as a destination for quick daily backups of C: and other disks listed below. My page file is on this disk

Y: 1 TB Data disk. This has my User profile (ie, Documents, Pictures, videos). This is the one I want to replace.

Z: 2 TB Apps disk. I install all programs (that give me the choice!) here.

That's a bonus that ll drives are labelled and are of different sizes!!

I think I'm getting the hang of it:

1. Boot from rescue disk

2. BU my Y: to a NAS

3. Shut down, replace the Y drive with the new larger drive

4. Boot from rescue disk

5. From Utilities-Add new disk partition and format the new disk

6 Restore data from NAS to the new disk

7. Boot into windows

8. Assign Y: letter to new drive.

I think it is a brilliant insurance plan to set up a new admin user, residing on C: before doing all this and using that to login to login in step 8 above. Belts-and-suspenders!

After verifying all the drive letters, I can re-start windows under my original user name and delete the temporary account created for this purpose (freeing the space on C: .. Every little bit counts!).  At some point, I'll buy a larger SSD and ckine my C drive to it.

I'll post here then asking for best way to do that.  One cannot be too careful when messing around with disks and partitions!!

Thanks again.

Aloke

Sounds good, Aloke!!

Just cutious, but how much space is in use on your C drive disk? I have all my apps there and a fairly small profile and an using about 90gb of my 250gb SSD with page file and all.

I ended up turning of disk protection as I found it to constantly grow and eat up spac, but never recovered files with it. 

I also found that iTunes was the biggest culprit of my storage space with phone backups located in appdata, which would greatly grow after each iTunes backup was created. To fix it,  I created a manual junction point of it to another drive so those iTunes backups would live elsewhere and then also don't get included in my daily OS backups with Acronis since I could care less if I lost them.

Last, and just me... I stopped using outlook and just use Google online now. Not long ago I believed firmly in using POP to the local machine, then switched to imap with a copy always retained on the server (seems safer). After about a decade of this I couldn't really see the point since the mail lived on the server anyway and have since just dropped outlook for the purpose of keeping a local copy (although I do enjoy the interface of it more at times).

Anwyay, those have saved me a lot of local space and greatly sped up my backup and recovery times.

I am using 201 GB on C: with 36 GB free. 

Many programs force themselves (or many parts of themselves, like user data) on C:

Restore points for the C: drive, Windows Update rollback files etc etc.

Some of it is MS Office, which has this streamlined install where one cannot pick the destination drive. 

Media player stores its indexes and thumbnails on C:

There are some utilities that I want to be available whenever Windows runs. Like motherboard utilities, backup/restore apps etc. I install those on C:

Some apps (Mozilla, Thunderbird) set up their own temp area on C: despite me moving the Windows TEMP and TMP environment to a different drive.

I periodically do Disk Cleanup but the detrius tends to accumulate over many years.  A Widows reset once every few years, followed by a re-install of the apps is a good practice. But, one gets lazy.. and it is dirt cheap to buy more storage, even SSD's!!

All my mail accounts in Thunderbird are IMAP accounts. It still keeps local copies of the emails, which grows and grows in size.  I wonder if there is a setting somewhere in Thunderbird to not do that ..

Edit: That was easy. Account settings-Synchronization and storage for each account.

In my case I use a separate drive for app installs and user data.  It is a 500GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD.  That drive currently has 81% free space.  My OS C: drive is a 256 GB NVMe PCIe drive which currently has 150 GB free space.  I also have VSS disabled on all drives in my system opting for the use of separate drive for that purpose which is a WD 1 TB Black HDD which currently has 884 GB Free space.

This system has been in everyday usage for 3 years now.  This shows how effective taking the measures I take are in relocating user data and app data where possible is.  I do know that turning off System Protection on all drives on my system and dedicating a single old spare drive I had to that task for VSS to use made a huge difference in free drive space on this system where System Protection has been disabled on all but the dedicated drive.  And yes, True Image does use the disk to create snapshots without a problem.

" I also have VSS disabled on all drives in my system opting for the use of separate drive for that purpose which is a WD 1 TB Black HDD which currently has 884 GB Free space. "

Is this a Windows Server feature? How do I move my C: drive VSS to a different drive in Win10Pro?

There are two pieces to this puzzle.  They are System Protection and System Restore.  System Protection is turned off by default in Win 10 and controls Windows Restore Points.  System Protection allows Windows Image Backups and Restore Points (VSS Snapshots) to be stored on a drive where System Protection is enabled.

So what I do is that I have System Protection enabled on my drive C but the amount of space used is manually set to 4% of available drive space.  That works out to 9.48 GB of drive space.  I do this as restore points on drive C are a good thing.  They are created each time Windows gets an update or when an app is installed so that if such changes result in issues you can revert to the latest restore point and roll back time to a known good state.  Because of this fact it is recommended that System Restore remain on for your C drive.  The problem is that on by default means that you are allowing Windows to manage your free space available for snapshots.  So Windows will use up to 100% of free drive space if it needs to.  As the free space fills Windows removes older snapshots to make room for other data but, this management can become troublesome in some instances.  So it is possible to manage this free space allocation which is what I do.

Now because I run multiple drives on my machines and I make backups of those drives as need be I have experienced on occasion times when a backup would not run due to insufficient free space for snapshots.  This is rare but I have encountered it.  So to get around that issue I dug out an old drive I had stored, wiped it clean, and put it to work as a dedicated VSS snapshot drive.  Here's how:

1. Navigate to Control Panel - System and Security - System
2. In the left hand margin locate and click on System protection
3. The system properties window will open allowing you to manage System Protection
4. You will see a button near the top labeled System Restore.  You would use that to revert to a restore point if needed due to a failed update for example or restore a Windows backup image file.
5. Below that is an area, Protection Settings where you can configure how System Protections works.
6. In the list of Available drives you can see if Protection is turned on or off.  It is logical to assume that if it is turned off then all is well.  That should well be the case but you can have a look at each drives configuration and see what settings are applied.  To do so click on a drive then click on the Configure button
7. A new window will open where you will options to Turn on or Disable system protection for the drive.  You will also see slider where you can set the amount of free space used on that drive for System protection.  With System Protection disabled this slider should be all the way to the left.  If System Protection has ever been enabled on the drive you might find that you cannot set the minimum space to less than 1%.  It is not an issue because if you have System Protection disabled then snapshots will not be created on this drive.
8. So in my case after installing this old drive I first labeled it VSS Disk then I configured it here as System Restore On and set the free space usage to 100% of free space.

That's it.  So now from time to time I will navigate to the System Properties as above, select this VSS Disk from the list, click on Configure, then on the next screen I will select Delete and remove all snapshots on that drive.  I have not had the need to do that on drive C so I am convinced that Windows directs snapshots to my dedicated drive once drive C free space as set becomes insufficient.