acronis true image wd additon
Couple of questions:
(1) Using a brand new hard drive and preparing to clone, the fullness bars for the original and to be cloned onto drive show equal length as expected (and seen on every other previously used drive I've cloned)
However, after cloning the the comparison bars are not equal length, the clone is much shorter. This has never happened when reusing a drive that has been used for backup before.
Was something omitted? Why the difference in percent full between the cloned drive and the clone?
(2) Can I use the WD version of acronis true image to clone a non system drive? If so, how?
Terry D
With my limited experience with WD OEM ATI is that either the source or the target must be a WD drive. For backup, it may be that the source drive must be WD, for cloning it may be that the targe drive is WD. As @Steve Smith says, you need to contact WD technical support to find the exact limitations on the OEM version - this may well be in the WD OEM user guide (which can be found on the WD www site).
I am not a fan of cloning - there is a risk of things going very wrong. I prefer to create a backup and then restore to the new drive. Even if you decided to clone, it is always a good idea to create a backup before doing so.
Ian
I used two WD drives, both 1GB storage. I do this all the time (once a month for each of two computers) so I'm very used to doing it. I bought some new drives, Western Digital Blue (my existing drives are WD but not "blue" but all the drives are 1GB drives.
What I mean by smaller is this:
Acronis shows a bar graph for disk fullness before and after the clone. One would think the bar would be the same length for the source and the clone and, in fact, Acronis thinks this too. It projects the bar being the same length after but in fact the bar is shown as much shorter for the clone afterwards which is worrisome.
I've booted from the clone all seems fine. Can it be that WD Blue are larger than 1GB even though they say 1GB or is something being left out of the clone?
Any ideas? Thanks! :)
Terry, thanks for the extra information. I very rarely use cloning for my own systems so cannot offer any precise reason or rationale for why there should be any difference between the original and cloned copy drives.
When using Backup & Recovery to achieve the same result as cloning, then Acronis has a set of default exclusions which can account for a significant difference in before & after sizing. For example, the system swapfile.sys, hiberfil.sys, pagefile.sys as well as the hidden, system folders used to store restore point data are all excluded by default (unless doing a sector-by-sector mode backup & recovery). These excluded files can add up to any size from 10 GB to 100 GB or greater, and are recreated by Windows on first boot.
Regarding disk drive sizes, then there can be small differences depending on the manufacture of the disk platters and number of any bad sectors factored in to still achieve the rated size, so yes two 1TB drives can have slightly different actual sizes.
I guess this will remain a mystery then as the amount of drive used (as shown in the bargraph) after the clone is very much smaller than the bargraph for the source drive that was cloned . Is there some Windows command that will show the "used" bytes on a hard drive so that I can ask windows what the sizes of the original and clone are to get a second opinion?
Thanks so much for the help :)
Terry D.
I'm grateful for the answers but still hoping someone can answer the second question asked in the original thread post.
Will Acronis copy a non boot drive (aka data only drive) to another, preferably maintaining the folder dates?
Thanks again! :)
Terry D.
IanL-S wrote:I am not a fan of cloning - there is a risk of things going very wrong. I prefer to create a backup and then restore to the new drive. Even if you decided to clone, it is always a good idea to create a backup before doing so.
Ian
What could go wrong other than a user error specifying the source and destination backwards?
As for my other question (simply copying a non system drive to another) Acronis (WD) will do this but it creates a system partition on the clone in addition to copying over the data with folder dates changed. Maybe this is a limitation of the WD version of Acronis, or maybe the expecation is that a user would simply use Windows commands to do that.
For instance, a simple drag and drop from a non system drive will work, but the folder names are given the current date.
Terry, there are lots of reasons why the MVP's are not fans of cloning...!
Please see forum topic: [IMPORTANT] CLONING - How NOT to do this - which was written after dealing with many cloning issues in the forums.
For dealing with a non-system drive, then why not just make a Files & Folders backup of the source drive then restore that backup to the target one where in the restore you have the options shown below (from the ATI 2021 User Guide manual).
File recovery options
Location: Recovery options > Advanced > File recovery options
You can select the following file recovery options:
- Recover files with their original security settings - if the file security settings were preserved during backup (see File-level security settings for backup), you can choose whether to recover them or let the files inherit the security settings of the folder where they will be recovered to. This option is effective only when recovering files from file/folder backups.
- Set current date and time for recovered files - you can choose whether to recover the file date and time from the backup or assign the files the current date and time. By default the file date and time from the backup will be assigned.
Thanks for the reply!
Wow, that all sounds complicated! I have a stripped down version of Acronis that only works on Western Digital drives and pretty much only clones. It does include It was free, so assuming WD threw it in as an incentive to sell more WD drives.
I don't have any sort of encryption in my windows installation. My free WD version has the ability to create rescue media for booting problems which I assume has the same function as the windows repair disk (I've had to use that once when a loose cable disconnected at the beginning of an Acronis cloning). My Acronis version also includes "Acronis Universal Restore" which has a locked symbol on it (probably to suggest purchasing it).
I clone our two computers monthly for many years and rotate the "stock" keeping staged backups at home in a sturdy locked cabinet, always with one recent clone in a safe deposit box at my bank.
I've never had any problem with this system. If anything, the warning that Acronis may screw up catastrophically makes me consider shopping for a safer product. How hard is it to write software the clones to another drive without screwing up the source? I have an uninteruptable power supply and staged (cloned) backups which I plug in and test from time to time.
Worst case if Acronis killed my source drive I'd plug in a month old backup and think, wow that was weird.
As for copying non system drives I guess I can either (a) learn the windows file copier syntax or (b) drag and drop copy, live iwth the folder dates being wrong and the file dates being correct. Or, as I did last time, just clone the non system drive with Acronis and ignore the extra partitions. Both methods work
What am I missing here and THANK YOU so much! :)
Terry, if you have a process that works for your scenario and requirements then I can only suggest keeping with that process and accept that occasionally there may be little quirks that can arise such as the original differences in size indications.
The really important factor is that you have one or more available 'backup' options to help you overcome any drive failures, virus infections etc.
For my own purposes, I prefer to have multiple scheduled backup tasks writing to multiple different destinations which is all automated and doesn't require manual actions as with the use of cloning, plus I can store multiple backup images on my destination drives.
I much appreciate all the help! :)
Terry D.