Direkt zum Inhalt

Macrium versus Acronis in cloning laptop drive. Seems a difference

Thread needs solution

Macrium versus Acronis in cloning laptop drive. Seems  a difference

I have used Acronis for years. In order to clone a laptop drive I have been told to take out the internal laptop drive and attach via USB. Then put drive I want to clone TO in the laptop. Then I would boot with the Acronis(14) USB media I had created. I would clone from the Source (external USB former internal laptop drive) to the laptop drive I just inserted. When done I would remove the USB cable and could boot directly from the drive in the laptop if desired. Have tried this and it works fine using Windows 8.1 (Do not have Win 10 at this time).

Macrium--from what I read in several places (I do not own software yet) you DO NOT have to take out the current internal laptop drive and attach as USB. You would simply attach a new or previous drive to the laptop via USB then run the clone option. This will create a bootable drive that when done I could insert in the laptop to boot.

Is this correct?

Thank you very much
Peter

0 Users found this helpful

I believe that, officially, you can do the same with Acronis True Image. The "reverse cloning" procedure you describe is what we MVPs recommend as a best practice, just the same as we recommend that users do not clone but instead do a full disk backup and restore.

We recommend practices that sometimes differ from the official tool options, based on the likelihood or possibility of unexpected and disastrous results, either because something failed or a user wasn't fully aware of what he was doing. I haven't used Macrium, but maybe we would recommend the same thing if we had used it.

Macrium uses Windows VSS to create a snapshot of the source drive and that snapshot is then used to clone the target drive.  This procedure does not require the source disk to be offline during the clone procedure thus the requirement to boot the computer to a recovery media environment is not necessary.  You are correct in your understanding of the procedure used by Macrium to create a disk clone.

Acronis True Image at this time does not use Windows VSS to create a snapshot for clone purposes.  True Image instead requires the computer be booted into a recovery environment to create a disk clone.  For this reason the MVP's here recommend that cloning be performed as you outlined in your post.  This procedure will avoid boot issues that may occur by running the clone from within the installed Windows True Image application.

 

Great answer. Thank you very much.Peter