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Disk cloning

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I bought True Image 2021 primarily to clone various disks on my many PCs as and when I migrate to larger drives and also to do the same thing on my Synology NAS which runs out of storage from time to time. The file system on my NAS is EX4, which I was told is supported by True Image 2021.

Unfortunately, while it seems that the clone of my 4TB drive (3TB used) was successful it didn't clone the boot information so the clone isn't recognisable by the Synology NAS. I contacted the online chat support at Acronis and was told by the tech among other things, to reformat my SOURCE drive as NTFS and try the copy again. Needless to say that would have erased the disk which shockingly she didn't seem to know. She went on to say that acronis cloning doesn't always copy drivers and boot information so after cloning, the drive might not work. She suggested I try to source the relevant drivers I need. I'm totally confused by this as I thought cloning was an EXACT copy of the source drive, therefore all drives and files on the source drive are copied to the destination drive.

To be clear, the source drive works perfectly but is a little slow due to its 5400rpm spin speed so I'm upgrading to a drive with 7200rpm. I'd have expected the clone to work perfectly as the drives are the same size so no need to alter partitions or anything.

Additionally the clone took 12 hours, (over 5 minutes per GB?) which is extraordinarily slow given that both source and destination are installed on the PC via SATA. In fact I also attempted to clone an 8GB flash drive with only 4GB used and that took 16 minutes!!! 16 minutes to copy 8GB seems very slow to me, not to mention the 12 hours for the larger drives.

Can someone please confirm if Acronis True Image is capable of making an EXACT CLONE of an EX4 4TB drive.

Thanks

My setup is:

WIN10 Pro 64bit

!6GB DDR4 RAM

ADATA M.2 PCI 512 SSD

Samsung Evo 500GB SSD

WD RED 3TB x 2

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Steven, welcome to these public User Forums.

First and foremost, ATI is intended for use with Windows or Mac OS computers, any support for Linux type filesystems such as EXT4 is limited and I would not recommend using ATI to Clone such Linux disks if used for the Linux OS or similar - this is because ATI will try to make the disks bootable in Windows (or Mac) which won't work!

If these disks come from your Synology NAS then perhaps the question to ask here is: why are you even considering using another system to migrate to a new disk?

If your Synology NAS has 2 or more disks in a RAID configuration, then you should be able to remove one disk, replace it by a new one, then let the Synology NAS rebuild the file structures on the new disk without any need to use other tools.

See webpage: How to Replace a Failed Hard Drive in Your Synology NAS - which is the procedure that I followed last year when replacing such a NAS drive in a DS215j NAS using 2 x 3TB WD Red drives.

Hi Steve,

Thanks for your response, but my Synology NAS has a single drive bay so cloning is the only way to migrate to a new drive when I run out of space. 
It should also be noted that I also used the ATI to perform clones on 4 drives on various Win10 PCs and in each case (without exception) I had to alter the bios to get the PC to boot. This suggests that the clone is not an exact replica of the source drive. Would the results be different if I created the clones outside of the windows environment? I’m referring to the option of creating bootable media of ATI and booting in DOS and creating the clones there.

Steve, thanks for the further information.

Touching on cloning Windows drives, the main factor to consider is the BIOS mode that is used by the OS on those drives, and that this must match the BIOS mode used by the system where the clone is being performed!

If you attempt to clone a Legacy boot (MBR) drive on a PC booted in UEFI / GPT mode, then clone matches the cloned drive to the PC GPT mode.  This is done by Acronis to keep cloning as simple as possible for inexperienced users where the expectation is that the cloned drive will go into the same PC!  There is no option to choose the partition scheme in the clone tool!

I have never attempted to clone a Synology NAS drive or any Linux EXT4 drive, so do not know whether ATI will attempt to impose similar partition scheme rules on those drives!!  Linux does support both GPT and MBR but may object if it finds a scheme it isn't expecting.

If you are considering using the Acronis Rescue Media to do cloning, then the same considerations apply but you can choose to boot the media in Legacy or UEFI mode, assuming your PC supports doing so (using CSM for Legacy).

You may want to look at using CloneZilla for the Synology EXT4 drive clone in that case as this is intended for use with Linux file systems.

I would do the same as recommended by Steve.  Since you only have one "working" instance of the original drive, I would recommend taking a "backup" of it with whatever tool you can and saving that backup image somewhere safe - just in case.  As mentioned by Steve, Acronis is really a Windows/Mac application so can't say I'd recommend it entirely for this case either though since EXT4 partitions have limited support.  either way, I would still make that backup so the data is still there and available in some type of format.

Beyond that, I would too a hardware duplicator in this instance to migrate the drive without the need for a computer or software.  Most of the time, these work great for like to like cloning and usually can work when going from smaller drive to a larger drive too... but will usually still require a 3rd party app or tool to extend the capacity afterwards.

I've had a lot of good luck with hardware duplicators (like $30 from Amazon), but just like everything else, there is still some risk in possible corruption and some people have reported just that in these forums and others online as well.  Backup for data redundancy/recovery and then try to clone with a hardware device if software isn't cutting it.

I personally like Sabrent and Startech devices as they have been pretty solid for me.  I don't own this particular model (link below), but seems like the right device for the price (if you want usb 3.1, you'll pay more).  Check Amazon or your local shops for similar devices / prices if you decide to go this route. And again, still try to get a backup for at least the data - Acronis, Clonezilla, whatever you feel comfortable with.

Example hardware offline disk clone dock:

Sabrent USB 3.0 to SATA I/II/III Dual Bay External Hard Drive Docking Station for 2.5 or 3.5in HDD, SSD with Hard Drive Duplicator/Cloner Function [10TB Support] (EC-HD2B)

Thanks to both of you for your help. The Win 10 disks I cloned (4) were all GPT and in 1 case it was even a Crucial 120GB SSD disk to another faster Crucial 120GB SSD. All clones were done in a separate computer across SATA using hot swap drive bays. I say this to indicate there were no conflicts between 2 drives with the Win 10 operating system on boot up, so I would have expected the cloned drive to boot without manual intervention. In any case adjusting the bios is a minor inconvenience As I had some time constraints, I went ahead and installed the new drive as a clean install and transferred the data back onto it. Nowhere near as quick as a clone should be but a solution nevertheless. When I need to perform my next migration I'll use CloneZilla as you've suggested as I already have it on a flash drive.