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Clone disk questions - newbie

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1 - My C Drive ( boot drive ) is 931GB, but is actually made up of 3 - 500GB drives running in a hardware Raid 5 config.   Does Acronis cloning care that I would be cloning from Raid 5 to a standard HDD or SSD?

2-  When cloning a boot drive, is it the size of the drive that matters to the target or is it the amount of data on the boot drive that matters to the target?

IE:  My C Drive ( boot drive ) is 931GB, but only has 150GB of data and I want to clone that to a 256GB SSD.... will that work?

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Cloning RAID arrays is not supported as RAID arrays are dynamic disks.  You can create a backup image of a RAID array and then restore that image to another drive which is what you would need to do in this situation.

Allan Grimshaw wrote:

1 - My C Drive ( boot drive ) is 931GB, but is actually made up of 3 - 500GB drives running in a hardware Raid 5 config.   Does Acronis cloning care that I would be cloning from Raid 5 to a standard HDD or SSD?

Since you have a hardware RAID, the real test is whether the Acronis Rescue Media can see it as a single volume. If it sees it as separate disks, you are out of luck, regardless whether you clone or backup and restore. So this is the first thing you need to ascertain.

If it sees the disks correctly, you should be able to clone/restore to any disk you want.

https://kb.acronis.com/content/11681

 

2-  When cloning a boot drive, is it the size of the drive that matters to the target or is it the amount of data on the boot drive that matters to the target?

IE:  My C Drive ( boot drive ) is 931GB, but only has 150GB of data and I want to clone that to a 256GB SSD.... will that work?

Yes, this should work. Again if clone fails, you can still to a full disk backup and restore.

Remember:

- always restore/clone from the Acronis recovery CD

- never reboot the computer with both the source disk and the cloned/restored disk in the same computer. You need to make sure the computer boots on the cloned/restored computer alone before reinstalling the older disk(s)

Just don't forget, as Enchantec posted above, you cannot clone dynamic disks (a RAID set is a dynamic disk, so clone is out of the question).  Instead, you would need to run a full disk backup and restore.  The outcome is the same, but you need to be able to save the backup image to a third location as part of the process.  However, you also get a backup in the process and can revert to it in case things go south at any point.  Cloning (when possible) has no safety net built in.  Therefore, Acronis recommends you take a backup image before a clone as a precaution.