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MacOS Catalina + Boot Camp with 2TB External HDD - How to create 1 partition for disk cloning and 1 for standard backups?

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I'm running macOS Catalina (10.15.4) on a 185 GB partition of my 250 GB SSD, with Boot Camp running on the remaining 65 GB. I'm using a 2 TB external drive as backup storage.

I like Acronis's Disk Cloning feature, as it's one of the cleanest ways to create a restorable / bootable backup of macOS and Boot Camp on a single drive. However, I'm struggling to figure out how to clone macOS and Boot Camp to a 500 GB partition of the external drive and use the remaining 1.5 TB for standard backups and / or file storage

I've formatted my 2 TB drive into 2 exFat partitions, but Acronis's Disk Cloning feature displays my external drive as only 1 storage device with 1 partition. The Backup function, however, recognizes both partitions correctly.

How, then, can I use a single external drive to store a bootable clone of my computer and use the remaining 1.5+ TB of space for standard backups / file storage?

Cheers

 

 

 

1 Users found this helpful

If you are cloning rather than creating a backup, then it will produce partitions the same size as those on the original unless you resize the partitions. At least that is how it works in the Windows version. Not sure if having duplicate bootcamp partitions available has the same issues when booting that Windows has. You should be able to recover the lost space using a disk management app.

You may get more useful advice if you repost in the (hard to find) Acronis True Image for Mac Forum as this forum tends to be frequented by mainly by Windows users.

Ian

Perry, I strongly suggest that you read the ATI 2019 User Guide for Mac about using cloning.

Example:

Click the cloning destination icon, and then select the destination drive for the cloned data.

Icon WarningWhen you start the cloning operation, the destination drive will be formatted, and all of the data stored on it will be irreversibly erased. Make sure that the disk is empty or does not contain valuable data.