Leaving the old drive in place after cloning it

I would like to continue to use my old drive (C: after I have cloned it to an external drive connected to computer through an external box via firewire. The cloning software guidance suggests that you should remove the old drive after cloning. I would rather put the newly cloned drive on the shelf rather than remove the existing (and functioning ) drive and replacing with the newly cloned drive. Placing the new cloned drive on the shelf would provide a hot swap drive in the event of a non-bootable C-drive (a situation that has happen several times in the last month). Can you provide guidance. Thanks.

 

IMO, you can do just that but it would be better to run with the clone drive so you know it is good. The original drive would certainly be OK because you were using it.

However, my first preference would be to do imaging of the drive rather than cloning. Depending on the size of the original drive and the second drive, you likely would be able to store several backups on the second drive. Cloning by its nature means you only have one backup of the original drive. Cloning is intended for drive replacement not as a backup method although some elect to use it that way.

 

You can do just that...really either way (clone or image). I would agree with seekforever that, if it were me, I would just make a complete (all partitions) image of the present C drive and then restore it to your newly attached destination drive. However, a clone will do the same thing in essence. It's really a coin toss. Using either method perform the operation w/Acronis and then shutdown, remove the present C drive, replace it on the cable in the same jumper config. as the old C drive, and re-boot and check to make sure it boots up and all is OK. Then remove it and replace the old C drive back on the cable, and store the newly imaged or cloned hard drive away in some safe place as you now know it 'works'.

To point out again seekforever's suggestion of leaving the new drive installed is definately the choice I would make. I would guess that the new drive is a larger or faster drive than the old drive, so why not just use it and store the old C drive away as you do know now it is good and will survive a reboot and operate. You never can really tell about hard drives. The last good boot that new drive made when you 'checked' it, may be the last boot it will ever make! The old C drive, well you can count on it to be bootable and in the end 'work'.

...Allen

 

Actually, this is roughly what I did on my new machine since I wanted to test out some multiboot XP/Linux combinations.

It came with a single 80 GB SATA drive running XP Media Center, which I set-up as desired, cloned to 250 GB SATA, and I then replaced the 80 GB with the 250 GB and put the 80 GB aside as my offline hardware rescue drive. A second 250 GB drive was used for Linux distros. The current setup uses GRUB to boot to XP/Suse/Xandros as desired. The 80 GB drive is available for recovery as needed. I went this route since I was able to pick up the pair of 250 GB SATA's very cheaply.

Blue

 

Thanks for the advice (and the additional comment from Blue and Allen). The differences between Cloning and Imaging are important in their intent. However, I lack full understanding of the implementation of the two approaches decribed. If I made backup images of the boot drive on a regular basis, it is unclear how I would use the drive containing the image(s) to boot from in the event my primary C: becomes unbootable. If I had a clone drive on the shelf I could replace the non-booting drive with it and be back in business in a matter of minutes. If I replaced the non-booting drive with the drive containing the latest image of my primary drive (before it failed), could I boot from the image drive? My notion (perhaps misguided ) was that you could not.

 

Kuroshio,

An image needs to be restored to another device to be operational, so you would not be able to pop a HDD with an image of your drive into you PC and immediately boot from it. A clone is operational as is, a simple device swap and you are back in business. A clone is also always device based while an image can be either device or partition based.

Blue

 

That is true that you can't boot from just an image *stored* on a partition of a hard drive, as you stated Blue. You always have to restore the image to hardware, namely a hard drive, be it your present hard drive or to a new hard drive. That should be evident to anyone who purchases a program such as True Image. The name say's it plainly ( Image). Cloning is just an extra thrown in feature of the program...not even necessary for it to be included. The hard disk manufactures make a bootable floppy downloadable from their Webpages that will perform the cloning easier, and much simpler than using Acronis, after all, it is first an imaging program.

...Allen

 

Blue and Allen,

Thanks for clarifying the differences. Based on past preformance of my PC, I think I better use cloning.