cloning using an ethernet cable
Is it possible to clone a disk directly onto another disk, using an ethernet cable to connect two PCs on a network?


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Do you really need to do a clone? You could do a full disk backup to another PC, then restore to a dive on the second PC. You may decide that the default exclusions are inappropriate if doing the backup from with Windows
Ian
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Cloning across the network is not possible in ATI. Any cloning is done via physically connected devices to the local PC where Acronis is running (either in Windows or from rescue media). Cloning also has other limitations as noted in these KB articles:
56634: Acronis True Image: how to clone a disk
61665: Acronis True Image 2019: Active Cloning in Windows
As Ian points out though, you can take a backup image of a drive and store it to a network share (remote PC share, NAS, etc) and you can restore the image to a hard drive from that remote share too. Just note that any Full disk or partition restores, as related to the hard drive where the OS is involved, should always be started from the rescue media, and not from Windows and here's why:
1) If it has to reboot the machine, it's going to modify the local OS bootloader with a temp Acronis Linux environment and it may fail to boot into it if there is a lack of drivers (say for RAID, PCIe NVME drives, etc). If you're lucky, it will just reboot the system back into Windows and you'll have to start again from rescue media anyway.
2) If it has to reboot the machine to continue, and has modified the local OS bootloader, if you're not lucky, in some cases it fails to revert the Windows bootloader back properly and can leave your OS in an unbootable state. You then have to have a Windows installer disc to try and perform a startup repair and/or manually start messing with BCD commands. This is not fun if you've never done it before. Although it is usually possible to fix this, it is not 100% either.
3) If it has to reboot the machine to complete, it's going to sever the network connection that was established to the share in Windows. When the temporary environment is loaded up, it will not automatically pick up the network connection (won't know the path or have the credentials necessary; as a result, it will immediately fail and then either #1 or #2 is going to happen.
Because of all these issues/possibilities, recovery of an OS disk or OS partition should always be started from rescue media to begin with - it's safer as it will avoid all 3 scenarios and in the end is simpler.
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Bobbo_3C0X1 wrote:
Cloning across the network is not possible in ATI. Any cloning is done via physically connected devices to the local PC where Acronis is running (either in Windows or from rescue media). Cloning also has other limitations as noted in these KB articles:
56634: Acronis True Image: how to clone a disk
61665: Acronis True Image 2019: Active Cloning in Windows
As Ian points out though, you can take a backup image of a drive and store it to a network share (remote PC share, NAS, etc) and you can restore the image to a hard drive from that remote share too. Just note that any Full disk or partition restores, as related to the hard drive where the OS is involved, should always be started from the rescue media, and not from Windows and here's why:
1) If it has to reboot the machine, it's going to modify the local OS bootloader with a temp Acronis Linux environment and it may fail to boot into it if there is a lack of drivers (say for RAID, PCIe NVME drives, etc). If you're lucky, it will just reboot the system back into Windows and you'll have to start again from rescue media anyway.
2) If it has to reboot the machine to continue, and has modified the local OS bootloader, if you're not lucky, in some cases it fails to revert the Windows bootloader back properly and can leave your OS in an unbootable state. You then have to have a Windows installer disc to try and perform a startup repair and/or manually start messing with BCD commands. This is not fun if you've never done it before. Although it is usually possible to fix this, it is not 100% either.
3) If it has to reboot the machine to complete, it's going to sever the network connection that was established to the share in Windows. When the temporary environment is loaded up, it will not automatically pick up the network connection (won't know the path or have the credentials necessary; as a result, it will immediately fail and then either #1 or #2 is going to happen.
Because of all these issues/possibilities, recovery of an OS disk or OS partition should always be started from rescue media to begin with - it's safer as it will avoid all 3 scenarios and in the end is simpler.
I made a backup (on a network folder) of a disk with all its partitions with the help of a removable USB media created with Acronis True Image. With the same removable media, on another PC, I performed the restore. On the target computer, Windows seems to boot (the logo appears) but then it is not so and the PC restarts. When restarting windows asks if it should start normally or run startup troubleshooting (which doesn't work)
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I made a backup (on a network folder) of a disk with all its partitions with the help of a removable USB media created with Acronis True Image. With the same removable media, on another PC, I performed the restore. On the target computer, Windows seems to boot (the logo appears) but then it is not so and the PC restarts. When restarting windows asks if it should start normally or run startup troubleshooting (which doesn't work)
If you are restoring a backup to a different computer than the one where it was taken from, then there are other considerations needed to ensure that the restored backup will boot correctly.
If you are restoring the backup to the same, original computer then there should not be an issue providing that the restore is done with the rescue media booted using the same BIOS mode as used by the Windows OS.
See KB 61158: Acronis True Image 2019: how to restore to dissimilar hardware
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Steve is right on the recover method being a major factor.
Also, the version of Windows used in the backup and restore can make a huge difference for successful bootability on different hardware. Windows 7 does not scale well to different hardware, but Windows 10 does.
And, in addition to the bios mode selected for the recovery and how that matches with the new system bios settings, other bios settings on a different PC can be roadblocks to bootability too. Things like secure boot being enabled, the default bios boot drive order may need to be updated, etc. And of course, if you have a 32-bit only machine (not likely in this day and age, but there are lower end tablets that are 32-bit only bios), then you won't be able to restore a 64-bit OS to them.
Acronis is capable of migrating an OS from one computer to another and being bootable, but there are limitations in certain OS's that need to be handled first, and/or user changes that they must make in the bios to make the OS bootable on new hardware.
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