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Cloning vs restore to a new drive

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So I bought a new SSD with larger storage to replace my current SSD.  I am running ACPHO-2021 and have good backups.  Since Acronis provides both tools, backup/restore and cloning, what is the fastest way to accomplish this migration to a new disk? 

 

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Fred, welcome to these public User Forums.

My personal choice & preference is always to use Recovery (restore) over using cloning.

Recovery is intrinsically safer than using cloning as the original working SSD can be removed from the PC and stored safely well away from any interaction with the operation.

Recovery also emulates the scenario that would be needed if the source SSD were to fail or die and a bare-metal recovery is needed, so will test and confirm that your Acronis rescue media is working along with your backups.

In terms of speed, I don't think that there is much difference as in both cases the original drive will need to be removed and the new SSD installed - the key difference being in the order in which this happens.

See forum topic: Steve migrate NVMe SSD where I have documented (with images) the process that I have used multiple times for my own laptops using Backup & Recovery. 

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Hello Fred!

Welcome to our community!

I would suggest you the same as Steve.

If you have good backups, I would recommend using the recovery method rather than cloning. Cloning is a bit riskier as it involves creating an exact copy of your old drive on the new one, which could potentially result in errors or corrupt data being transferred over. With the recovery method, you can restore your data from a backup onto the new drive, ensuring that everything is transferred over correctly. Additionally, since you have good backups, you can easily recover your data in case anything goes wrong during the migration process. So, I would suggest using the backup/restore method.

Thanks in advance!

Hello!

 

Thank you Steve and Jose for your recommendations, I actually tried both methods and each time on startup that there was no accessible drive on the system and the boot stopped at that point.  The first attempt was via cloning, the second attempt was a restore.  Both failed with the same message.  Likely due to Nvme driver incompatibility, the old SSD was Samsung, the new one is Crucial.  On the second attempt, I rebooted the machine into safe mode and windows substituted the "missing" driver with a generic Windows one and the machine then was able to boot and after I then installed the driver from Crucial and all was good.  As far as I could discern, there was no noticable difference in the time each process took.  Thanks once again for your replies and sorry I didn't get back here sooner to report on my progress.