Re-clone clone, or what?
I have Acronis True Image 2018. It saved my butt. Had cloned my Dell XPS desktop drive last year with it and the clone took over automatically when the main drive crashed about 10 months ago. I did a standard Windows backup on an external HD a few weeks before the crash so I did end up losing some data. (I’m doing backups much more often now!) So now what was the clone is my main HD and I have since replaced the dead HD with a new drive and used True Image to make it the new clone. My question is, do I ‘re-clone’ the clone drive or do something to keep the clone more up-to-date?


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Thanks so much for your reply! To repeat the clone process do I need to first erase the existing clone drive and then run Acronis clone again, or if I use the Acronis clone function on that drive does the Acronis clone function know that it is already a cloned drive and to replace whatever is already on that drive?
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Steve, if you want to use the newer Acronis Active Clone feature in ATI 2018 & later, then it is best to delete the existing partitions on the target clone drive before starting, as ATI will see the existing OS files present and will want to reboot the system to do the clone otherwise.
Please ensure you pick the correct drive when erasing / deleting partitions or volumes etc!
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Okay, I would now like to repeat the cloning process. The problem is, how do I know which drive is the existing clone that I need to erase and re-clone? My main drive and the clone drive are identical models Western Digital 1TB drives. Control Panel Device Manager shows the two drives with the exact same part number. Acronis True Image 2018 shows “disk 1” and “disk 2” with identical part numbers and no indication as to which is the main drive and which is the clone. I don’t want to erase the wrong one. I do know which is which drive physically as I labeled the clone when I installed it.
Thanks again, Steve N
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Steve, the safest method I would recommend would be:
Power down the computer, disconnect the second / cloned drive.
Boot back into Windows then rename the main Windows partition using the option in Explorer to make it obvious that it is the main boot drive.
Power down again and reconnect the second drive.
Boot back into Windows and look at the drives again in Explorer and you should see which is which by virtue of the different names for the Windows partition.
I use a similar naming approach on my dual-boot laptop to ensure I know which copy of Windows is which.
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