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Which brand usb drive for bootable media do you use?

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I am new to Acronis 2020 and am ready to create the bootable media on a USB drive.

I have read that SanDisk USB drives sometimes have problems.

What other brands have people used with confidence?

Thanks for any advice you can provide.

 

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Lynnea, any brand should work fine provided you observe some simple rules:

1.  Size is between 2GB and 32GB maximum.

2.  It is formatted as FAT32

3.  If it has been used for something else previously, that it is fully formatted (not quick format).

If you need to reformat a used drive, then using the following commands from a Windows Command prompt window will do what is needed:

Preparing USB drive for use by Acronis using Diskpart
diskpart
list disk   (to identify USB drive, i.e. 1)
select disk 1
clean
create partition primary
active
format fs=fat32 quick
assign
exit

Note: please double-check that you are selecting the correct disk drive as using this against any other drive will wipe all data when the clean command is executed!

I was mostly concerned that SanDisk was cited as having problems.

Thanks for the information.

 

I cannot comment directly about SanDisk as I have never used them for Acronis rescue media - most of my USB sticks have been Integral brand which have always been very reliable over the many years that I have used them.

The other option now available is to create an Acronis Survival Kit on an external USB HDD drive, where the rescue media is written into a 2GB FAT32 partition at the start of the drive, then it can be used both to boot from the rescue media, and used as storage for backups, or to host the files needed for recovery, all from the one drive.

The option to create a Survival Kit is only offered when you are creating a new Disks & Partitions (or Entire PC) type backup task and are setting the Destination for the task to a suitable external USB drive that can be used for this purpose.
See KB 61639: Acronis True Image 2019 and 2020: how to create Acronis Survival Kit - for more information on the process.
Also KB 61738: Acronis True Image: Survival Kit disk partition for backups is limited to 2TB on BIOS-booted systems
And Acronis Article:  The Acronis Survival Kit

I have a Samsung 32GB drive I can use.  I did see that 32GB is the limit for Fat32. 

I will only be using Acronis for creating a clone of my desktop in the even one of my raid drives fails.  I have another backup program for data.

 

I have had good luck with Lexar and SanDisk.  SanDisk drives do come with some software preinstalled on them in most cases.  My practice with that is to use Windows Disk Management to delete the volume on these SanDisk drives then, create a new Simple Volume on them formatted as FAT 32.  32GB is the largest you can use for boot media.