Cloning with a Previously Cloned Second Drive
About a month ago I cloned (using ATI 2009) my drive to a brand new spare and it was a success as the clone would boot an operate exactly as the original drive. Due to a motherboard changeout, I now need to make a new clone of the internal drive and would like to reuse the spare that I previously cloned. My question is this. Do I need to delete what is on the spare (second disk), or simply do the clone operation same as before but over the data now on the second disk? Perhaps the program takes care of this situation automatically, I do not know. If I need to clear the spare out first prior to cloning, what is the suggested procedure or method? Any help is appreciated.
Let me ask you some more questions to check if this procedure will work, as I am not really sure what you meant by "when booted to the TI CD".
Here is what I had in mind.
Plug the second drive into the second SATA connector on the MB. With both drives plugged in, turn the PC on and let it boot up. How can I be sure in doing this that the PC boots from the correct drive? If it tries to boot from the old drive (pre motherboard change) there will be many problems. Is there an option to plug the second Sata drive in hot while the PC is turned on and already booted up, sort of like USB devices?
Once booted, it should see the second drive and assign a non-"C" drive letter to it, right?
Then launch ATI and proceed to Utilities and initiate cloning Drive One (C) to Drive Two (non C). Will this work, or do I need to delete or reformat the old cloned data that is already on Drive Two prior to this new cloning attempt? Perhaps ATI will just overwrite or reformat the destination Drive in the process. Do you know if that is correct?
Sorry for the questions, I am just a novice on this stuff, and do not want to really mess something up.
Thank you in advance!
Dan:
If I were doing this I'd do the following:
Rename your existing drive to something different than the old drive is named. This way you will be able to be sure which drive is which. Create a text file on your hard drive that won't be on your old drive. This will give you a second way to be sure which drive is which.
Run TI and create an emergency boot cd. Now boot from this cd (it is a Linux booting minimum version of TI) and make sure it can see your main hard drive.
Shut down computer and install your old hard drive to a spare sata port. Now you will have two hard drives present.
Boot up from the cd and do the clone. Go slow to make sure you choose the correct source (it has the new name and text file). You do not need to delete files or partitions from the target drive.
When clone finished, shut down, don't reboot until you remove your source drive, and now power back up and you should be good to go using the new target drive as your drive.
Fungus
PS: I don't like clones. I use an external usb drive that I put many .TIB images on. When I need to go back to a previous date, I can simply restore a certain image to my C: drive, or to any other drive I want to put in the computer.
I have TI.11 that i made a cloneof new Dard drive for back up drive that is 6 months old and would like to keep updated .is cloning over top of old clone the way to go?
Hello all,
Let me comment this situation.
First of all, thanks to MudCrab and Fungus for correct answers!
Carlton, generally, you can keep your drive updated by periodical cloning, but note that clone will reflect only the current state of the drive you're cloning, all information from old clones will be lost!
In this case the more convenient way would be just create full backups and create some chain with incremental \ differential backups, so the product will backup only data changed since the last full backup.
Please keep in mind the difference between full, incremental and differential backups:
A full backup contains all data at the moment of backup creation. It forms a base for further incremental or differential backup or is used as a standalone archive. A full backup has the shortest restore time as compared to incremental or differential ones.
An incremental backup file only contains data changed since the last full or incremental backup creation. Therefore, it is smaller and takes less time to create, but as it doesn’t contain all data; all the previous incremental backups and the initial full backup are required for restoration. To restore an incremental image, the incremental image and full image must be in the same folder.
Unlike incremental backup, when every backup procedure creates the next file in a “chain,” a differential backup creates an independent file, containing all changes since the last full backup. Generally, a differential backup will be restored faster than an incremental one, as it does not have to process through a long chain of previous backups.
The full information about backup procedure in Acronis True Image 11 Home is available in Chapter 5 of this User's Guide.
Additionally to this, you are welcome to ask me any other questions concerning Acronis, and I will assist you further.
Thank you.