Salta al contenuto principale

Can I clone my entire system onto a separate hard drive?

Thread needs solution

Can I clone my entire system onto a separate hard drive? If so, in the event of hard drive failure, I can just plug in the cloned hard drive and my operating system, applications and settings will resume exactly as the last date cloned?

I'd like to clone a SSD, is it possible to clone a SSD to an older spin hard drive?

Which is better to do so - Online Acronis Cloud Back Up or Acronis Home software?

Thanks in advance for your time and understanding.

Best,

Fuiru

0 Users found this helpful

Don't use Clone. Do a full disk Backup, selecting the entire disk, and a Restore. The end result will be the same as Clone, but with many advantages.

A full disk backup, selecting the disk checkbox rather than individual partitions, includes everything. It includes everything that a clone would include.

The difference is that while a clone immediately writes that information a single time to another drive, a backup is saved as a compressed .tib archive. As such, multiple .tib archives may be saved to a single backup drive, allowing for greater redundancy, security and flexibility.

Once a full disk image .tib archive is restored to a drive, the result is the same as if that drive had been the target of a clone done on the date and time that the backup archive was created.

Clone is riskier because we've seen situations where users mistakenly choose the wrong drive to clone from and to, thus wiping out their system drive.

Thanks Tuttle,

So am I right in thinking that a full disk back up is exactly like a cloned hard drive but it compresses all the files? Thereby allowing you to back up several instances of your operating system and applications on a back up hard drive?

I'm using Windows 7 64 bit and have a tonne of Adobe applications that require a lot of time to re-install in the event of hard drive failure. I'm really worried about not being able to back up Windows 7 and third party applications.

I currently have a 240 Gb Vertex SSD and would like to either back up or clone it onto a 500GB Samsung mechanical Hard drive. Therefore in the event that the SSD fails, all I've got to do is redirect the bios to boot up from the Samsung hard drive and I'm exactly where I left off.

Is this possible? Can you do this via Acronis Cloud?

Thanks again,

Fuiru

Fuiru,
When a cloning operation is performed, only the target disk should be connected to the system after completion and before boot. It is not recommended to leave the source disk (one you cloned from) connected at the same time and then to rely on BIOS settings to correctly identify the desired boot device.

Tuttle's recommendation to perform a full back up image of your boot drive (entire disk) all partitions is the preferred method. All operations should be performed using an Acronis Boot CD.

**Tuttle, didn't see you online. Sorry for jumping in :0)

Fuiru wrote:

Thanks Tuttle,

So am I right in thinking that a full disk back up is exactly like a cloned hard drive but it compresses all the files? Thereby allowing you to back up several instances of your operating system and applications on a back up hard drive?

Yes.

Fuiru wrote:

Thanks Tuttle,

I'm using Windows 7 64 bit and have a tonne of Adobe applications that require a lot of time to re-install in the event of hard drive failure. I'm really worried about not being able to back up Windows 7 and third party applications.

A full disk backup will include everything.

Fuiru wrote:

Thanks Tuttle,

I currently have a 240 Gb Vertex SSD and would like to either back up or clone it onto a 500GB Samsung mechanical Hard drive. Therefore in the event that the SSD fails, all I've got to do is redirect the bios to boot up from the Samsung hard drive and I'm exactly where I left off.

You would boot from the Acronis True Image Recovery media (either CD or USB), then Restore your most recent full disk backup. After the Restore, you would boot from your hard drive and it would appear as it had at the time of the last backup.

I don't know about Acronis Cloud.

Hi Shadowsports & Tuttle,

Thanks for the reply. Much appreciated and exactly what I was hoping for...now to try it out :)