Urgent Urgent - Did I Say Urgent? I want to prematurely terminate a cloning op

I just purchased Acronis True Image 10 Home at Fry's

I spent this past weekend installing and rebuilding a new C Drive on my computer. A buddy of mine told me about Acronis and said I should get it to clone my hardrive. I did.

After a day and a half of creating a new Windows Xp Home Sp2 operating system C drive with CAD software etc I wanted to save that work and cloned it to a same size drive different manufacturer (Hitachi - C Drive - 160GB (153 GB shown) to a Seagate - D Drive - 160 GB (149 GB shown)

I started the operation last evening 12 hours ago and I am currently in Operation 3 of 3 - Wiping Disk. Current operation progress is 60% and Total Progress is 98%. .Based on how slow the current operation progress is going I estimate completion approx 9 1/2 hours from now

I am cloning C to D. D did not have any data on it. C drive has 1 1/2 days of my sweat and tears rebuilding on it that I will not want to redo - thus my desire to clone it.

I was given three options about the data and partitions on D. I think I chose an option that said get rid of data on D and keep the partition as is.

Based on how slow the current operation progress is going, I estimate completion apprx 9 1/2 hours from now. I can not wait that long. I have always used Norton Ghost and 12 hours was the longest I had to be out of pocket, I guess with Acronis its more like 20+ hours to clone a 160 GB drive.

Questions:

What is my downside for terminating the process now?

Have I damaged C in any way if I stop it now? (Data loss, ability to read C, etc)

Can the process be resumed later on D?

I have more questions but want to start with those

Thanks, Mark

 

You've posted this issue three times already. Use task manager to kill the process.

 

You did not answer the question about the dowside of stopping the process in task manager to my C (source drive) and D (target drive)

Will any data on C be corrupted or damaged in any way

Will I be able to resume the process of cloning at some later date or will I have to start again.

 

As long as you didn't choose to delete the source drive it should not affect drive C: (default is to leave source drive intact). I can't say what drive D will look like but you can always start over. Multiple thread posts on the same issue will not get you help any faster.

 

Be aware, use of cloning, or even merely contemplating it's use can cause triple-posting and other failures of netiquette ;-)

 

What I don't understand is why cloning should take so long? There must be lousy support for the drive controller since this is from one internal drive to another. Very odd.

It would make much more sense to create backup images of the C drive to the D drive. Then, images could have been made during the day and a half reinstallation as protection against a bad program or hardware installation.

The images should take only 10 minutes, at least at the start before too much software in installed.

Something is odd here.

 

For your purposes you shouldn't be cloning anyway. Cloning is generally only used when you want to replace one hard drive with another and is not commonly used as a backup strategy (although there are a few users who follow a cloned-backup strategy involving multiple drives and frequent drive swaps). Making an image (or, usually, multiple images) is a far more flexible way to create useful backups of your OS and installed software. The main advantage of imaging is that images are much smaller and much faster to create, plus you can store multiple images on a single drive. Also, images can be validated (checksummed) to confirm that they are not corrupted.

New users often get cloning and imaging mixed up. To clarify how an imaging solution might work for you, here's a typical scenario:

My C partition contains 9 GB of data (my OS and all installed software) in a 15 GB partition. (I have a separate data partition "D" which I back up separately). It takes ATI about 15 minutes to create an image of my C partition and save the image (which is just a large file) onto my second internal drive. I could also save it onto an external hard drive or a couple of DVDs. If I ever need to restore my C partition from the image, it will take about 15 minutes to restore. (If my OS is broken I can always boot from the rescue CD to restore the image. It can also be restored onto a blank drive.) Each image file is about 5GB in size. I have about 20 different images archived on my second internal drive (with dates and descriptions), so I can choose which one I want to restore (although it's usually just the most recent one).

Is that the sort of backup strategy you are trying to achieve? Then ditch the clone and start over. I'm pretty sure it won't hurt the data on your source drive if you interrupt the process. If it did then this board would be full of complaints from people who experienced a sudden power surge or outage during a cloning operation and lost both drives, but fortunately we aren't seeing those kinds of posts.

edit:
PS: To make an image you start by choosing "Backup", then choose "My Computer", then select the Partition(s) or the entire Drive that you want to image, then go on from there.

 

Hello ELGINILWILLOBY,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please be aware that there are two approaches available:

Clone Disk - migrates/copies the entire contents of one disk drive to another;

Backup - creates a special archive file for backup and disaster recovery purposes;

Please take a look at this FAQ article explaining the difference between Clone Disk and Backup approaches in more detail.

Actually, Clone Disk approach is usually used to upgrade the hard drive (e.g. install a larger disk), while Backup approach is basically dedicated for the complete data backup and disaster recovery purposes. Since you are interested in backing up your hard drive for the disaster recovery purposes, we would recommend you to follow Backup approach.

Moreover, there are several advantages of creating an image over the disk cloning procedure such as: you can create an image without rebooting your PC, image creation can be scheduled for the particular point in time, Acronis True Image allows you to create incremental and differential images, image archive contains only the actual data and so it has a smaller size, images are ordinary files and so they can be stored on any type of the supported media, etc. However, the final choice is always up to your needs.

Please notice that as described in chapter 13 "Transferring the system to a new disk" of the respective User's Guide, you get 2 options for the data on destination hard drive and 3 options for the data on the source hard drive. Based on that and the information that wiping a drive is last scheduled action, it would seem that "Destroy data" option was chosen for source drive. Therefore, if you interrupt the process, the outcome will be D drive as a clone of C drive (before the start), and C drive partially erased. You can use your new drive as system and old one for other purposes; or you could clone your new drive back to old one (without erasing the source).

You can find the detailed instructions on how to use Acronis True Image 10.0 Home in the respective User's Guide.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov

 

Yikes! When you were setting things up, on the "Old Hard Disk Usage" screen, did you select "Destroy Data"? That option would have applied to Drive C, your Source drive. It's pretty obvious that this wasn't your intention, and in your post you say that you thought you had selected that option for Drive D, but as Acronis Support points out, the options are different for the Target drive. Thus, you may have mistakenly selected that option for your C drive, and when you placed your post you may have been in the middle of the phase that wipes out your original disk. My apologies for not having studied your original post more closely.

So - what happened? Did you end up wiping your C drive? (Is this why you are no longer posting?) I am hopeful that you at least ended up with a bootable clone that you can install and use. Please let us know how things turned out.