Direkt zum Inhalt

Cloning obs and problems

Thread needs solution

I have two laptops. Both run Windows 7 Professional. One is 32 bit with USB 2 and the other 64 bit with USB 3.

Secondly, I am using a Thermaltake Blacx Duet 5G dual HDD docking station to mount the drives.

Thirdly, my 2 TB HDDs are all identical - Seagate Barracuda XT ST32000641AS.

Both laptops can mount and see, create partitions and edit both drives.

Issues:

When cloning a Linux RAID disk, 32B will allow me to select a source but not a destination disk. Everything is greyed out.

64B lets me select source and destination but gives me the error message that one disk may be larger than the other, then proceeds anyway.

Can not seem to find the options to copy and ignore errors even if I run the process in manual.

Questions:

Did I choose the wrong software package? Should I have bought Acronis 11 instead of Home 2012 for more detailed disk cloning with options to ignore disk errors?

Why would a 32 bit USB 2 setup not clone when my 64 bit USB 3 will clone the very same disk?

0 Users found this helpful

Is there a reason you need to Clone? Really, Backup is safer and more flexible. Many users encounter problems Cloning which they would not have if they has instead used Backup.

1. Don't use Clone. Do a full disk Backup, selecting the entire disk, and a Restore. The end result will be the same as Clone, but with many advantages.

2. Check out the many user guides and tutorials in the left column of this forum, particularly ATIH 2012 - Getting Started and Grover's True Image Guides which are illustrated with step-by-step screenshots.

A full disk backup, selecting the disk checkbox rather than individual partitions, includes everything. It includes everything that a clone would include.

The difference is that while a clone immediately writes that information a single time to another drive, a backup is saved as a compressed .tib archive. As such, multiple .tib archives may be saved to a single backup drive, allowing for greater redundancy, security and flexibility.

Once a full disk image .tib archive is restored to a drive, the result is the same as if that drive had been the target of a clone done on the date and time that the backup archive was created.

Clone is riskier because we've seen situations where users mistakenly choose the wrong drive to clone from and to, thus wiping out their system drive.

The backup/restore idea is actually a great idea. However, I am cloning two of my three 2 TB drives before we try and repair the broken RAID on my NAS. My laptop only has a 500 GB drive and I'm pretty well out of spare 2 TB drives now that I need them for cloning.

Do you have any answers for the questions I asked?