Does Acronis True Image Disk Cloning Always Erase The Destination Drive No Matter What?
I previously cloned ~1.3tb worth of my newer mac's hard drive to a 5tb external hard drive using Acronis True Image 2021. There is still plenty of space left on the external hard drive however. So my question is can I now clone my old mac's ~500gb hard drive onto the same external hard drive as I used for my newer mac's cloning without erasing the first clone? (Without erasing my newer mac's previous clone?)
Essentially I just want to be able to have 2 clones on a single external hard-drive without erasing my first clone, any thoughts? i don't want to go forward with this until I know for-sure what will happen because it took days to clone my newer mac so I'd prefer not to just trust Acronis to not delete my first clone--because I simply don't know if it will or not when I actually hit the button to clone the second smaller hard drive.
So just to reiterate and to simplify my question, and add a similiar scenario:
1) What will happen if you clone Computer A onto a new external hard drive that is way bigger than Computer A's hard drive, and then you clone Computer B onto that same external hard drive seems there's still technically plenty of room? Will Acronis erase Computer A's clone when you clone Computer B?
2) And speaking on this same topic, what if you clone Computer A once on a new external hard drive, then a week or two later you want to make a new clone of Computer A, then what happens? Does it blow away Computer A's first clone no matter what--even if there's still plenty of extra space on the destination drive?
If Acronis True Image's cloning tool always reformats the external destination drive no matter what--even if the external hard drive you are cloning them on still has wayyy more room on it--then that is not very desirable to say the least.
I did do multiple searches on this topic by the way, to no avail. I really like the idea of being able to clone the full hard drive and create an exact replica parallels virtual machine out of it later if possible, I realize I could go the other route and just do the regular Acronis backup--but that's not what I want and that's not what I'm asking about.
I even tried partitioning the external hard drive prior to my initial clone of Computer A and it looks as though Acronis re-partitioned the whole hard drive to just be an exact replica of my mac's hard drive. Which begs the question--what if I want another clone or even another version of the existing clone? Do a need a brand new hard drive for every clone and every new version of a clone no matter what? (Assuming I don't want to erase the old version(s)/clone(s) and assuming there's still plenty of space on the destination drive)
Thank you!
I even tried partitioning the external hard drive prior to my initial clone of Computer A and it looks as though Acronis re-partitioned the whole hard drive.
Chase, welcome to these public User Forums.
Caveat: I am a Windows user with no direct experience of using ATI on any Mac.
I can only recommend reading the document in my signature that explains the differences between Cloning and using Backup which should make it clear why what you have seen is working as intended.
A Clone is a 1:1 duplicate, i.e. disk 1 duplicated as disk 2 using all available disk space!
A Backup is a compressed copy of disk 1 that can be stored on disk 2, leaving room to store further backup copies as needed if size permits.