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Cloning to USB Drive

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I just did a clone of my hard disk to a 128GB USB jump drive.  At the start, it said the size of the file is 101GB, so figured I was OK.  After the 6 hour clone process, all I have on my usb drive are 2 files:  oobedone.flg (1KB) and bios_cur.rcv (8.3MB).  Does that sound correct?  Also, doing a properties on my usb drive, it now says 8.3MB used and 31MB free, total size 39MB.  What happened to my 128GB?  Do I have a clone image or not?  Is it not recommended to clone to a usb?  I'm at a customer site in a remote area and it's all I have.

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Eric, welcome to these user forums.

Cloning is intended to make an identical copy of the source drive on an a second drive of sufficient capacity.  This should always be done using the offline Acronis bootable Rescue Media and it is recommended that the target drive be installed in the computer in place of the source drive, which should be connected externally via a USB-SATA connector or in a caddy.

I suspect that when you say 'clone' you may actually mean making a backup of your source HDD drive which creates a True Image Backup (.TIB) container file to hold the compressed contents backed up from the source drive.  You cannot boot into Windows from the .TIB file or from a clone of the source drive written to a USB drive.

Please see the following KB documents that provide much more information on this subject:  
56634: Acronis True Image: Cloning Disks  
1540: Difference between Backup and Disk Clone  
58816: Acronis True Image 2017: Creating Acronis Bootable Media

Pretty sure that cloning is not supported to a flash drive since flash drives are not bootable for Windows - suprised it would even allow it to be picked as the destination disk.

Even if the clone was successful (which it may be), Windows can only read the 1st partition of a paritioned flash drive (Windows limitation) so I suspect that's why you only see a small amount of data listed now.

You should format your drive completley.. used diskpart (launch command prompt by right clicking and run as admin)

diskpart.exe

list disk 
(select the # of the one that representes your USB flash drive)

clean

Then go into computer management / diskmanagement and "initialize" the disk and assign it a drive letter.

Alternatively, use the free tool, minitool parition wizard and format it with that instead.  

Ultimately, a clone does you no good and neither would a backup and recovery to a UsB flash drive.  Only thing your flash drive is good for is using it as a backup location for a backup .tib file of the original drive.  You could then restore that backup file to another internal SATA hard drive in the event that the orignal dies, needs to be replaced or upgraded. 

Steve Smith wrote:

Eric, welcome to these user forums.

Cloning is intended to make an identical copy of the source drive on an a second drive of sufficient capacity.  This should always be done using the offline Acronis bootable Rescue Media and it is recommended that the target drive be installed in the computer in place of the source drive, which should be connected externally via a USB-SATA connector or in a caddy.

I suspect that when you say 'clone' you may actually mean making a backup of your source HDD drive which creates a True Image Backup (.TIB) container file to hold the compressed contents backed up from the source drive.  You cannot boot into Windows from the .TIB file or from a clone of the source drive written to a USB drive.

Please see the following KB documents that provide much more information on this subject:  
56634: Acronis True Image: Cloning Disks  
1540: Difference between Backup and Disk Clone  
58816: Acronis True Image 2017: Creating Acronis Bootable Media

Does Acronis 2019 still have the following limitations on Windows 10 system?

1. Cannot clone from source to target when target is on USB drive?

2. If both M.2 SSD NVMe drives are internal ( one new, other source ), can use Acronis 2019 app to clone from inside of windows ( instead of booting from USB created with Acronis Survival Kit ) since it creates a VSS shadow first, then copies to the new M2 in the system.

 

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Does Acronis 2019 still have the following limitations on Windows 10 system?

1. Cannot clone from source to target when target is on USB drive?

2. If both M.2 SSD NVMe drives are internal ( one new, other source ), can use Acronis 2019 app to clone from inside of windows ( instead of booting from USB created with Acronis Survival Kit ) since it creates a VSS shadow first, then copies to the new M2 in the system.

Hi! 
1. Should be no issue, check out Cloning to External USB Drive 
2. Possible with Active Cloning feature https://kb.acronis.com/content/61665

It doesn't work with flash/thumb drives that are considered "removable" in Windows disk management. Those have never been usable for cloning. Cloning has worked with external USB drives that are considered "fixed" disks (those that aren't flash/thumb drives) for as long as I can remember though.

Just wanted to reference for others. SG and I have been testing PCIE NVMe drives in the latest USB external enclosures and cloning works great with them in 2019 too. You do have to take the NVMe drive out and mount it in the be PC if you want to boot it though.