Cloning laptop hard drives
Good Day All,
New to the product and this forum...
In working with Acronis tech support to try and resolve a Vista issue I found out the proper way to clone a laptop hard drive way to put the drive into the laptop that you want to clone to and leave in the laptop. So ie cloning from the usb drive image to the primary hard drive inside of the laptop.
I haven't been able to find out reading docs so far why this is required, and the reason I am searching out this answer is because I am doing a lot of testing of cloning and backups and sometimes I simply want to take the changes on my laptop hard drive and clone this solid state drive to my backup hard disk drive for recovery purposes. So i want to leave the the solid state drive in the laptop at all time for operation, but should i still move the SSD to the USB drive and put the backup HDD to the laptop , then clone, then switch the drives back??
Any help or direction to a document that will answer this would be appreciated.
Thanks for your time and attention! :0)
Darren Vaillant
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Appreciate the suggestion - butu I am not doing it for backup purposes (ie dont mean daily and weekly changes of daily use, but admin and config differences). So I agree with having a full backup image as well but details as to why cloning laptop drives are done in reverse would be helpful
I do have an external drive for a full then incremental backups but I have multiple machines and multiple on going projects and testing ...
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You said you wanted it "for recovery purposes". That's what a full disk backup image is for, as it would recover everything, including "admin and config" changes.
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For all my machines and my clients I do backups regularly, but as a disaster recovery situation I go another step and that is bring a computer up to all windows updates, data to date, all programs installed and updated - then clone that drive and put the drive on a a shelf , with hardware failure of drives at a high rate these days sometimes I need to be back up and running in minutes not hours so dropping out a drive and swapping in another is pretty dam fast :0) In other cases I have run into certain models of laptops require the recovery drive along WITH the DVD's - for my customers their clones are stored offsite....
Anyways again I appreciate the feedback on best practices and such but again finding out why in the case of a laptop we have to put the source drive in the usb drive ...
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The reason hard drives should be put in the target location for cloning is to be sure the drive is recognized by the system BIOS or UEFI firmware, and setup correctly when connected to the system's internal hard disk controller. When a drive is placed into a USB external drive enclosure, connected to a USB to IDE, or USB to SATA adapter, the drive geometry could be setup differently than when connected to the system's internal hard disk controller. This can create boot ability problems for the cloned drive. It is also good practice, when cloning, to shut the system down after the clone process ends, and disconnect the original hard drive before booting to the newly cloned hard drive. This prevent Windows from possibly changing the drive letter assignments on first boot (or recognizing the wrong active partition), making the newly cloned drive not bootable without some type of OS Startup Repair procedure having to be performed to correct this.
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Darren Vaillant wrote:For all my machines and my clients I do backups regularly, but as a disaster recovery situation I go another step and that is bring a computer up to all windows updates, data to date, all programs installed and updated
Again, a full disk backup image is for disaster recovery. A full disk backup image includes everything that a clone would include, but is safer, more flexible and offers greater backup redundancy.
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Great explanation James! But if I may ask... based on what you have said I would think that should be the setup for cloning regardless if it was a laptop or a desktop, in yet I "thought" I was told that this config setup was "just" for laptops... Did I hear wrong?
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Laptops are the most problematic, but it is good practice to follow this advice for all clone operations. I have cloned without doing this many times and have had good luck. I have also done this and had boot issues. Repeating the clone with the drives set as described in the above posts, provides a more reliable method. It can waste some time to find out that you need to clone again, a second time, or have to perform Startup Repair because of something than could have been prevented in the first place.
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Mr Turtle my friend - again thanks for your input but I was not requesting or debating the best practices of how to backup - I was trying to give you a little insight to the many different computers, OS, customer vs personal lab, and situations I run into on a daily basis and required an answer that James gave so I WHEN DOING A CLONING I do it properly. and fully understand whats going on in the background.
I have been doing this for over 20+ years and I dont pretend or think I know it all - far from it - but the more I know on the how and whys then the better I will know this software and the better I will be able to give back and help others on this forum as time goes by and I make this software dance and do things it's not supposed to LMAO jk but will use my tech support background and give back to others here when i can...
Always appreciate someones thoughts :0)
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Yes I agree fully James - I was generally ok the other way unless I was dealing with VISTA {insert groan here lol}
Thanks for your time on this!
(I may be back in a day or so when I upgrade my Acronis main laptop to Windows 8! lol
Cheers
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