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2018 Acronis - 500GB OS Drive Clone Takes Up Entire 2TB HDD

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Hi, 

I tried to contact support but was unaware that they stopped support a couple of months ago. Unfortunate.

I have a 500GB Samsung 850 Evo hard drive inside my laptop which has (OS, Files, Recovery Partition etc)

I recently bought a Seagate 2TB external hard drive which I wanted to use to clone my Samsung 500gb should anything happen (while I clean up my laptop during this stayathome stuff).

  1. I reformatted the 2TB and tried to split it into multiple partitions so that I have my 500GB clone and still about 1300GB of free space to backup other files.
  2. Acronis forced a format of the partitions and entire hard drive.
  3. Now, my 2TB isn't accessible via file manager to add more files to it and it's almost as if the 500GB Samsung clone is actually taking up the entire 2TB space

Questions: Is there no way to have Acronis clone the 500GB into a 500GB partition on the 2TB external harddrive?

Am I better off using an open source disk cloning tool instead? Or am I better off never buying Acronis again and instead try to use the Samsung disk cloning software instead?

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1 Users found this helpful

First off, it is not a good idea to have two drives with OS on it; when you clone you should remove the original drive once the clone is finished.

Long time since I used ATI 2018 (I am using 2020), but somewhere when doing the clone there is an option to resize partitions. I find it rather messy; I use a HDD management tool to resize the partitions - you can get the free version of MiniTool Partition Wizard to move partitions and enlarge the OS partition.

Rather than enlarging the OS partition you could create a separate partition on which to store data, this allows you to have multiple backup tasks designed to reflect the frequency with which the data changes.

Ian

Luis, welcome to these public User Forums.

Questions: Is there no way to have Acronis clone the 500GB into a 500GB partition on the 2TB external harddrive?

Answer: NO!  Cloning is a 1:1 direct relationship between two disk drives.  It copies from the source disk to the target disk using the whole available disk space.

Forget about using Cloning and use Backup instead, where you don't need to create separate partitions and can create multiple backup images of your source disk on the larger drive without any risk of wiping out what is already on the drive.

See the link in my signature to a document descring the Difference between Cloning and Backup.