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cloning a hard drive says 1 day 4 hours????

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Cloning a 950GB harddrive with about 600GB worth of data and the progress bar keeps jumping up every 30 minutes or so. It got as high as 1 day 4 hours and has come back to 17 hours. Does it take this long to cloan a drive or am i having issues that are not popping up?

 

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Ron, welcome to these user forums.

It is difficult to say how long your clone may take as this will depend on a lot of different factors such as, the speed of the processor, memory, disk drives, connections used (USB 2.0, 3.0, SATA), the type of data on the source drive, and whether the source or target drive has any issues (bad sectors, unsupported file systems etc).

I am assuming that you are following the recommended process for cloning as described in KB document: 56634: Acronis True Image 2016: Cloning Disks.

If any problems are encountered during cloning, then Acronis may resort to doing a sector by sector copy of the data which will potentially copy the whole drive.

I would recommend checking the log file information in the Acronis bootable Rescue Media before shutting down the computer when the cloning process completes as this information will not be available after that time.

I cancled the clone and rebooted the system into safe mode with command prompt. I then ran a chkdsk /F. rebooted and started the process again. Better results this time. Time left is now 55 minutes at about the same status bar from last time that said 17 hours. 

If there is a bad sector on the drive, will the clone process hang or fail to clone?

 

 

A bad sector can prevent a clone.  Basically, if a sector is bad, the process could get hung up on it.  Before a clone, chkdsk is a good idea. Alternatively, you can do a backup and restore and there are options to "skip bad sectors" but then you also risk missing a critical file in the process.  Cloning is a bit more restrictive than backup and restore though so if you do have clone issues, try backup and restore instead (you need a third location to store the backup image though, but you also get a good backup which might save you in the event that the clone process goes badly or your disk is about to die and that's why you're trying to clone). 

There are other clone limitations too:

https://kb.acronis.com/content/56634

https://kb.acronis.com/content/45437

 

Ron,

I have 9 systems with Acronis TI2016 installed and I've experience the same thing as you from time to time...

Start up a backup only to go back an hour later and find it's barely moved and is saying like 14 hours to go...

What I've found is it's best to have the USB external drive already running and connected to the computer before

you boot the computer...In my experience the occasional slow backup happens mostly when you already had the computer booted

and then you hooked up the external USB drive and then started it...I've learned also not to walk away until it actually

starts backing up so you can see it's going normally (or not)....

 

Good advice Dave!

If you watch the backup for a bit too, you'll also see that "status bar" jump all around - it is far from accurate.  It may get bogged down and show several hours and then return to a more reasonable timeframe as it is handling different types of data on the drive, especially depending on how fragmented it may be.  The time remaining is really less of a status bar and more of an estimate - would much prefer to have a real progress bar which shows the transfer rate (like how Windows does when copying and pasting files) as that would give a much more accurate timeframe.

Thanks for all the advice.

This system has been slow and the HD seems to be the issue. Was hoping I could clone this drive to another identical drive and avoid a new install.

Seems that the drive has some bad spots on it that is going to prevent me from doing this. Left it running last night and found a popup this morning saying it could not read a sector.

 

Ron, try running a CHKDSK /F /R on your drive with the bad sector to see if it can correct the issue or reallocate the data to another sector.