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Missing files in source after cloning

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Hello Acronis community, I`m new here and hope to get some help. So about my problem, I wanted to clone 500GB SSD disk to 240GB SSD Disk, the source disk was almost full, there was like 20GB empty left I think, so while in cloning process, I have chosed manual cloning mode, and chosed some folders to exclude. Cloning process took like ~2min (The cloning size was ~120GB), wow I thought, really fast, and tried to boot from source disk again. System started, everything worked well, exept the files which I have chosed to exclude, were missing! Tried to connect the destination SSD disk, to check what is inside that disk, but when I try to open the partition, it immediatelly asks to format it. Any ideas what happened here?

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First, you should never attempt to boot to a newly cloned disk until you have disconnected the source disk.  This can confuse Windows and can cause corruption on disk.

In your case it sounds like you did that but got lucky and the machine actually booted to the newly cloned disk thus the absence of the excluded files.

From there is sounds like you have attempted to open the C:\ partition on the old disk and that is generating an error. 

I would suggest that you shutdown the computer, disconnect the old disk, then boot to the new one.  After that is successful, shutdown again,  connect the old disk, start the machine and once booted try to access the old disk partition again.  It should work.

Sorry, I have missed your comment. The system wont boot with new disk, it seems it wont cloned the files to it, just made the partitions. Tried then to change back to original, but files still missing

Did you make a full backup of your source 500GB SSD drive before you embarked on attempting to clone it to a much smaller SSD drive?

I have never known ATI to remove files from the source drive when doing a clone but there are a number of rules that it is important to follow when doing cloning to safeguard your data.

Please see forum topic: [IMPORTANT] CLONING - How NOT to do this

You may want to consider opening a Support Case directly with Acronis support while ATI 2018 remains still in support.  (Support will be ending soon now that ATI 2019 has been made available).

Did you use the Clone tool from within Windows? 

If yes, did the app say that a reboot was required?

If yes, did the reboot take you to the clone tool or back to Windows?

 

Just happened to me too.

Though I got bit more details.

This was the first time I used usb instead of a dvd and I cloned 500GB HDD to 120GB SSD

total data on the hdd were like 130GB

I booted the usb but in leggacy mode.

At first it tried to tell me i need to free extra 0.3TB like it was trying to clone the empty space too. I tried again and then it wised up and just had me exclude two folders.

The clone itself was suspiciously quick. Then I moved the ssd to the notebook and it would not boot. I realized that the notice about not booting in bios was for real and booted the usb in uefi and went for this again.

The bad feeling started when it did not ask to exclude something, it just showed me how the drive would look.

That was big WTF, so I stopped everything and returned the HDD in to the notebook to see its working. It booted fine so I returned to clone and let it finish. This time it was slow as I remember it. saying 7 minutes and doing it for like 20 min.

Then afterwards of the folders are not there and they are not on the source drive either.

There was no notice about touching the source drive. Well, at least it was not important data, but i am in WTF mode still.