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Cloning HDD to SSD - preparation takes hours?

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I am replacing my SATA-HDD on my laptop with an SSD. Both have 1 TB. I try to clone the working disk from within Windows - True Image 2021 with the new SATA-SSD on a USB adapter. Automatic cloning chosen. To my surprise I was informed that there was not enough space on the new SSD for my data (100 GB empty on the HDD), so I selected unnecessary folders to be excluded. Now True Image has been grinding data for hours, task manager shows 2 apps entries with quite some activity, so it has not frozen. Just stays with "exclusion criteria" and announces to be working. I am ready to wait over night, if reasonable, but I wonder whether it would be better to do the cloning with a bootable True Image USB-stick? How swift cloning usually goes?

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Franz,

Cloning is not the preference of the MVP community here.  Disk image backup and recovery ore preferred for a number of reasons.  The biggest reason I do not recommend cloning is the fact that cloning is nothing more than copying one disk to another with all data and formatting.  If your source disk has errors those will also be transferred to the target disk.

Disk image backup and recovery does not do this.  Disk backup uses MS shadow copy service to take a snapshot of the data on the disk to create a backup file.  This backup file can then be used to restore the captured image to a new disk.  The new disk is formatted in this process and then the data captured is written to the new disk.  This yields a superior result and is less prone to failure.

In my experience with cloning, such operations which take hours or days usually fail in the end because of some form of corruption on the source disk.

Hi Enchantech, thanks for Your response.

Why I did cloning was that I was too impatient to spend the extra time for the backup/recovery process....

But I lost my patience anyway and interrupted cloning from within Windows after several hours of endless grinding. Just now I started the cloning process from a USB-TrueImage bootmedia and that does not show the troubles as experienced with the Windows-app. But I will take your advice, make a backup of my HDD and recover it on the SSD tomorrow....

My experience with cloning is not as bad as yours. It has worked for me several times in the pass without problems.

I did it now as suggested via backup. Took 2 eternities (backup HDD to NAS and recovery to SSD on USB3-adapter) although all LAN connections are GB ports. Thereafter booted without problem and upgrade really was worth it.

Franz,

Glad to hear of your success.