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Cloning a 4TB HD to 500GB SSD

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Hello,

 

I’ve looked through some of the other conversation around cloning HD to SSD, but can find one that fits my question.

I’ve recently cloned a 1TB HD with 180GB of data to a 500GB SSD with out any issues.  So then on to another machine, which has a 4TB HD with 280GB of data.  I’ve moved around 1TB of documents to another drive, to get the used space to less then 500GB for the new SSD.  Unlike my first machine which worked on the automatic setting running the clone directly within Window10, this 2nd machine keeps asking form me to exclude files and never seems to get to a point where it is happy to run the clone.

The SSD has been initialised under Disk Manager, which is all I did with the first machine, no formatting of any sort.

Would anybody have an idea as to how to get round this or am I best now taking a back up of the drive and restoring that to the SSD, as suggested here https://forum.acronis.com/forum/acronis-cyber-protect-home-office-forum/acronis-2021-disc-clone ?

I’m using True Image 2021, Build 39216.

Cheers

Richard

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Richard, welcome to these public User Forums.

Personally, I use Backup & Recovery every time in preference to using Cloning.  Backups can be scheduled regularly & automatically, and can help keep the original source drive fully isolated from the intended target drive when the Recovery is performed after booting from the Acronis bootable Rescue Media with the target SSD replacing the original HDD.

In terms of size, migrating from a 4TB HDD to a 500GB SSD - the size of used data on the source drive will be a major factor, especially if any of that data is considered to be non-moveable!

I would suggest initially using Windows Disk Management and try to Shrink the source volume to see how low this will allow it to go?

After that, then you may need to use a partition manager tool to do some further adjustment of the size of partitions on the source HDD, which again will help make the eventual migration much smoother.

Steve,

Many thanks for the guidance, I'll look at trying that.

I'm only trying to do it this way to save time rebuilding from scratch, but it might even be the best option anyway.  At least I know it good and stable rather than being a little bit of a fudge.

Cheers

Steve,

Again, thanks for your ideas, but in the end I ended up with a new rebuild of the OS on the SSD.

Richard

Richard, thanks for the update.  Doing a fresh install / rebuild often has other benefits for clearing out lots of accumulated dross!