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Disk Restore to New Disk Fails

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I had a data disk fail on me a few weeks ago. When I tried to carry out a disk restore from a validated backup to a new larger disk, the restore failed. After working with Acronis, I was able to manually retrieve my data, but it took me over a week of very tedious work.

Before this whole episode began, my data partition was located on a dedicated 3 TB internal drive that was about 90% full. The drive failed and I replaced it with a 5TB internal drive and painstakingly restored it using the work-around Acronis suggested. It currently uses about 2.4TB out of the 5TB. From what I can tell, backups to a NAS have been progressing well according to the status messages I see, file date stamps, and cleanup processes (e.g., daily incrementals, with weekly fulls).

I had a spare 4TB external drive I use for offsite backups so I decided I'd try to do a recovery of my main Data drive (that is, drive D) to the empty external drive since it should contain ample space (4TB) to cover the 2.4TB of data actually used. Using the Acronis application in Windows, I was able to select the D drive for recovery and tried to do a disk recovery. However, it wouldn't let me recover claiming I didn't have enough space on my external drive. That wasn't good, so I thought maybe the drive size has to match, so I purchased a new external 5TB drive to match the size of the internal drive. Once again I was prevented from selecting a drive recovery even though the disk sizes now matched. So I can't seem to do a drive recovery of my 2.4TB of data to either a 4TB or a 5TB drive. I've also tried to do a disk recovery using the bootable Acronis CD with the same result.

As a result of these failures, I began to do a file recovery instead of a disk recovery to the 5TB drive. I had to select all the individual folders at the root level of the drive and am trying that now, but the operation seems quite slow and the topmost folders didn't get placed in the root location of the drive. It will take well over a week to recover the data in my test, so I aborted it.

Bottom line: Acronis seems to have some restrictions with regard to drive recovery that I can't seem to get around. What are they? Further, I definitely don't want to risk doing a recovery onto my one and only good data drive. How can I do a data recovery to a new external drive to prove to myself that a recovery operation will succeed. Right now, I have very low confidence that I can recover from my Acronis backups. If I cannot perform a recovery, I will be forced to change vendors after 10 years with Acronis. What am I doing wrong?

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BTW, I am running Windows 10 with the latest patches on a machine with 32GB of RAM. Non-RAIDed disk (except for the NAS on which the backups are targeted).