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Acronis True Image 2016 does not see my external drives

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I would like to back up to my external drive (3 TB Seagate) but I can't select it as destination because I just see the message "Plug in your external drive".  I have tried different ports and for the heck of it I tried a different external drive, but Acronis does not seem to recognize the drives.

On my desktop, I have Acronis 2015 and that one has no problem backing up to a different Seagate drive. 

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I take it this is a laptop or portable computer you are having issue with?  Can you plug in other devices/drives to the problem computer using the same USB ports and have those devices/work? 

You might try this, shutdown (turn off) your computer (not a reboot), detach the external drive, restart the computer.  After the computer has fully booted attach the USB drive.  Windows should detect the drive and initialize the connection.  Now look at Windows Disk Management, does your drive appear there?  If so then True Image should have no problem with accessing your drive.

I have a laptop that I need to upgrade the hard drive on.  I have  True Image 2016.  What's the best way to image my old drive to my new drive?  It's my understanding that I can not clone to an external drive is that correct that the new drive must be connected internally is that correct?

Yes that is correct, you must connect the new drive internally in the laptop and connect the old drive via USB connection or to another internal connection if available.

You must create Recovery media using the Media Builder tool available located in the Tools section of the installed Windows True Image application.  After creating this media make certain that your machine can boot to it before proceeding any further.

In the future please create a new thread for your issues, this will allow others to comment on your question and does not Hijack someone elses posting.

Reference the links below for more in depth details.

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/ATI2016/index.html#3…

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/ATI2016/index.html#2…

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/ATI2016/index.html#3…

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/ATI2016/index.html#2…

Thanks for the input.  Restarting the computer and reconnecting the HD seems to have worked.  

Just to be clear.  Acronis True Image 2016 is incapable of cloning an internal hard drive to a USB external hard drive?

Is this correct?

That is not correct. Cloning can be done from an internal drive to a USB attached drive.  However, the recommendation is to remove the original, put your new drive where the original was, and attach the orginal to an external UsB case or dock and clone from the USB to the internal drive.

There are other limitations to cloning though, such that you cannot clone from a larger disk to a smaller disk, or from disks that have different sector sizes

Cloning your hard drive

If you are having issues cloning, I would highly recommend instead that you take a full disk image of the original disk (all partitions) and save that to another drive.  Then put in the new disk where the original was (original is no longer needed and should not be connected).  You would then use bootable offline recovery media and push your image back to the new drive and that will basically have the same result, but you will not those other limitations, and you'll have a nice backup of the original drive, just in case.