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Best practice for transferring an image to a new drive

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Let's say I have backed up an image and want to transfer to a new drive.

What's the best practice? What are the steps I should take?

How do I make sure I transfer the entire image - including hidden emergency rescue drives?

What issues do I need to be concerned with moving from a large size to a small size drive?

Typically, moving from standard to SSD you always have the issue.

AND: MBR vs GPT.

I've messed up on this many times. I always go for MBR - it seems to be fail safe.

Just looking for a best practice guide.

Thanks.

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Omar, you may want to take a look at the Best Practices for data protection Forum where a number of different areas of best practice have been discussed with other users over recent years.

To try to answer your specific questions:

If you have made a full disks & partitions backup image of your current disk drive, then providing that you have included all hidden/system partitions in that backup image, you should be able to restore it to a new disk drive assuming that the size of your data (used space on the original drive) can fit on your new drive.

With a full backup image, provided this is good, i.e. no errors occurred when it was created - the log for the backup shows the backup was successful, then there isn't really many other steps that you need to take other than to understand how to do the restore.  We would recommend always using the Acronis bootable Rescue Media for any restore that involves the Windows OS drive, and this should be booted in the same mode as used by Windows, so if this is a Legacy (MBR) system or if this is a UEFI (GPT) system the rescue media booted accordingly.

If you are migrating from a larger disk drive to a smaller one such as a SSD drive, then the main concern is over the size of the data on your original disk and whether you would need to move some larger data such as videos, photos, music etc to another drive.  For SSD drives it is recommended to have a minimum of 20% free space to allow for over-provisioning on the drive.

With regards to choosing between MBR and GPT, this is really a matter of what is supported by the BIOS used by the computer, so if your computer is an older MBR type BIOS, then GPT is not an option as this requires UEFI, but if you have a UEFI system, then the default will normally be to use GPT unless the BIOS also has support for Legacy/CSM which would need to be enabled to support MBR.