Upgrading from TI8 - And a cloning question

I have been using a registered legit copy of TI8 updated to build 937. Although I am very diligent at making backups, I have not had the occasion to actually need to do a restore.

I have in fact cloned two hard drives, and it worked great, except on my Dell 8400 it took the original partitions, 2 hidden and the c drive and doubled the size of the hidden partitions for some reason. So the original 3 gig partition actually was cloned as 6 gigs. I thought that TI8 would have simply used the current size but in both cases it resized the partitions, leaving me with a bunch of dead space.

Have there been enough improvements/changes to warrant spending almost as much I did for TI8 to move to TI9? I really don't need the scheduled incrementals as I just do a full backup once or twice a week and delete the older backups. It seems a number of people have made the jump to TI9, and when it first came out, I remember almost as many staying with TI8 due to new version issues.

Just wanted to know where TI9 stands in everyone's mind and if they are of the opinion that TI9 has increased the safety/productivity of their backups.

Thanks.

 

When you clone to a larger drive, TI8 automatically proportionately upsizes all existing partitions unless you manually set their size for the new drive. It sounds like you cloned to a new drive about twice as large as the source drive, hence the doubling of the hidden partitions.

I have both TI8 and TI9 but use TI8 v937 exclusively because I still don't trust TI9 and don't need its new features.

 

bobdat:

Thanks for the quick and insightful reply. You hit it right on the head. I originally had an 80 gig Seagate SATA that came with my Dell. I upgraded to a 160 gig Seagate SATA with NCQ.

I thought I looked to find a way to simply clone the drive using the same size partitions, but did not really find a solution. If memory serves me right, (it's been a few months), I believe there was a setting to just clone it automatically. Maybe I erroneously believed it would automatically size the drive to equal the old one. Your reply cleared it up.

Can you inform me (for future use), as to how to make sure I do this manually in the future? It would be helpful.

Thanks again.

 

It's too complicated to re-explain here. Print out the TI8 user docs and when you clone next time, select the 'manual' partitioning option and experiment a little.

With the Dell partitions, be sure you don't downsize them. A ballpark maximum size you could use would be about 75MB for the Diagnostic partition and about 4GB for the Restore partition.

 

Bobdat:

Thanks for the suggestions. I will do that.