Skip to main content

Is Clone Disc The Best Way?

Thread needs solution

My previous restoration using Acronis from a desktop hard drive failure, was to an external drive.  So that I could get back up & running quicker.  Now that my computer is fully functional again, I want to get my files that are on my external drive, to my new internal drive.

Surely, I could copy/paste all those folders to the new drive within Windows.  However, since the files are just about 2TB, even though, I did the copy/paste in chunks of folders, it still occasionally would freeze on me.  And even though, I went back & copied over those folders again once everything was completed, I had a slighter small file size on my new internal drive & less files then what appears on my external drive.  This is all based off the properties manager in windows.  And doing it this way, based off the time it took this past weekend, seems to take longer then from an acronis restore.

So in order to make sure no files are missing, since eventually this external drive, will become another acronis backup drive, I was thinking of using the Clone Disk feature.  Would this be the best option from within acronis?  The drive in question is NOT the main drive, so there are no installations of windows on it.  It is purely a file drive.

However, I am not sure if both drives have the same logical sector size as per: https://kb.acronis.com/content/56634 & I wasn't sure if this would cause any future issues doing it this way.

Or should I do just a typical restore from within acronis from one of my backups of this internal drive?

0 Users found this helpful

Michael, personally I would not be considering using clone for the process you have described but perhaps I am not privy to all the full details of what your drives are here, what is stored on them etc.

If you already have a good, full backup of your internal drive that is stored on an external drive, then I would recommend recovering that backup using ATI.

If what you have here is a copy & paste of all the files & folders from the original internal drive that has been copied to the external drive, then there may already be differences between what was on the original internal drive and what is now on the external one.

Ultimately, you need to decide on the quality and completeness of the data involved here.

If you have already done a reverse copy of the files & folders on the external drive to your new internal drive, and are mainly concerned about the integrity of the copy, i.e. is it a good match?  Then I would use a File & Folder synchronisation program to verify this and to identify any files present on the external drive that are not present on the internal one!
One free program that I use is SyncFolders which does a very good job for this type of requirement.  The key benefit in this approach is avoiding having to wipe the internal drive which both an Acronis recovery or clone would do!

Steve, thank you for your reply.  I didn't get an email notification that the thread was replied to, which is why I am just seeing it now.

Basically the drive in questions stores all of the files & folders on the computer.  It does not store my Windows system or programs, etc.  But it is the most important drive I have.

Ok I can use my backup & restore it that way.  The new internal drive, that I noticed differences on with the copy/paste, I wiped that drive again, so that there wouldn't be any potential missing files.

So I think the safest method is to just restore it using ATI as you suggested.

The only downside per my previous issue from earlier last month.  Is that this backup was from a restore, at the end of the restoration, it didn't stop because it then went into trying to backup from a scheduled session.  And all the files had long file names.  However, once I clicked stop everything appeared & it does seem to have copied over everything that I have noticed in the past month.

I do have a copy before that, but then I would need to run a sync manager, to make sure it copies over whatever is new.