Few questions about HDD cloning...

[mazz72]

Hey all,

Just a few quick questions:

1. Can one clone an entire drive to a partition on another drive....thereby being able to combine clones of several drives all on to one big drive (assuming the total size of all source drives doesn't exceed the size of the destination drive)?

2. Can one clone a drive to another drive of lesser capacity, if the data being cloned does not exceed the capacity of the destination drive? (as in...20gb worth of data on a 160gb drive being cloned to a 40gb drive)

3. When cloning from one drive to another....does the speed of the drives matter? (cloning a 10,000rpm to a 7200rpm)
(I'm pretty sure that's a stupid question and the answer is "no it doesn't matter", but I thought I'd throw it in there anyway) ; )

4. Can any or all of these be done using Acronis True Image?

Thanks

Matt

[glc]

1. Yes. It is quite involved and you have to pay very close attention to what you are doing, but it CAN be done. You will have a separate partition for each clone, and you need to be mindful of the limits of how many partitions you can have on a single drive.

2. Yes. Defrag the source drive first.

3. No.

4. Yes.

With all that said, if you are doing all this for backup purposes, it's a lot more efficient just to do images, not clones.

[mazz72]

Thanks a lot glc.

I realize images may be the better backup solution, but I just wanted the info so I could weigh all of my options. I may very well just wind up doing a clone of my OS HDD, and differential image backups of my data drives.

And based on this information, I'm assuming I should be able to do both of those on the same hdd (given the drive is big enough, of course).

Thanks again. : )

[glc]

If you do that, create folders on the clone drive for storing the images.

[mazz72]

Originally Posted by glc If you do that, create folders on the clone drive for storing the images.

OK, but what does that do? I was going to put 2 partitions on the clone drive. One for the clone and one for the images. How would folders help? Just curious.

[glc]

I suppose you can do it that way - I just don't think it's necessary. Remember that when you do an image, it's stored as a single file.

If you use folders, if you ever have to use the clone you will have all your files backed up as explorable images without having to deal with trying to restore them from one drive or partition to another.

[mazz72]

Ok, makes sense. But my concern is this: Say I want to redo the clone of the OS drive at a later date (after updates, adding a new app, whatever)....will that wipe out the images, too, if they're in the same partition?

I was under the impression that Acronis reformats the destination drive/partition before a clone.

[glc]

That is true.