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Laptop single drive upgrade

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Is there a good white paper or tech note that describes a best practice procedure to follow to upgrade a hard drive for single drive windows machine (XP and windows 7) with ATI Home? Possible options to perform prior to cloning: backup; disk cleanup (methods and tools); recovery disk if needed. Is a simple automatic clone of the internal disk to an external USB replacement disk going to be optimal, capturing the hidden partitions and boot loader without extra effort such that just powering down and swapping in the new drive boots correctly? Another item to optimize might be partition size choices for optimum performance and security when going from a small (<100GB drive) to a large (>1TB) drive.

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My best advice: Do not Clone! Instead, do one extra step and create a full disk Backup to an external drive. If ever you need to return to that image state, you would do a full disk Restore/Recovery.

There is rarely a need to Clone. Really, Backup is safer and more flexible. Many users encounter problems Cloning which they would not have if they had instead used Backup.

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

2. Check out the many user guides and tutorials in the left margin of this forum, particularly Getting Started and Grover's True Image Guides which are illustrated with step-by-step screenshots.
29618: Grover's new backup and restore guides http://forum.acronis.com/forum/29618

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.