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Cloning operation went over TWO hard drives (my intended one + another) and destroyed my data

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I had 3 hard drives in my computer -- 1) source HDD, 2) destination SSD, and 3) data HDD. My goal was to clone #1 to #2.

 

I double and *triple-checked* that #3, my data HDD, was not anywhere in the equation of the clone operation. It is 2TB in size, which is very distinct from the other two drives (each of which is much smaller). But for some inexplicable reason Acronis cloned #1 onto #2 AND #3.

 

How could this have happened? Was it a bug? What went wrong? I'm devastated. I even used Acronis because it's the "official" recommended program from Western Digital for their hard drives to clone, and not some other program, JUST SO something like this wouldn't happen. 

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Peter, welcome to these public User Forums.

Sorry but I have never heard of or seen any reports of cloning doing as you have described here and writing to more than a single target drive!

In terms of being able to try to determine what has gone wrong, more information is needed:

What version / build of ATI are you using?
Is this a full commercial version, or one supplied by an OEM such as WD with a drive purchase?

How was the clone done here?
Was this run from within an active Windows desktop or did you create and boot from Acronis Rescue Media to perform the clone?

If run from within Windows, what do the logs for the task show?
You should be able to use the MVP Log Viewer tool to see these (link below).

If run from boot rescue media, then the log would have to have been saved before exiting from the boot media else are lost from that volatile environment.

Do you have any backups of the data HDD that you can recover it from?

Hi Steve, thanks for the response. 

 

There was actually a similar post to mine when I came on the forums initially, right before the one I made. https://forum.acronis.com/forum/acronis-true-image-2020-forum/help-plea…  Not sure if that one was the software, or user-error, or a mix of both (the software not making it obvious what is about to happen, or something)

I was using ATI within Windows. I just got a SanDisk SSD, so I used the version of ATI that was able to be activated due to having that (sorry, don't have more details on that at the moment). In terms of the log file, where would that be found?

Peter, if you started the clone from within Windows, then do you remember if it needed to do a restart of Windows to continue the clone operation?  If yes, then any log is lost because the restart launches a temporary Linux OS environment and the log is lost when the system restarts after the clone.

If the clone was performed fully from within Windows, then any log should be found at C:\ProgramData\Acronis\TrueImageHome\Logs\ti_demon in a ti_demon log in that folder.

Please download the MVP Log Viewer tool (link in my signature below) and use this to review the log file for your clone operation. This should provide more information on what happened during that operation.

See KB 2201: Support for OEM Versions of Acronis Products which applies to all OEM versions of ATI supplied with hardware purchases.