Afternoon, all. Simple request this time (for once) - any proven, tested, working disk cloning suggestions out there? I've got a free copy of Crucial's version of Acronis which is one such, plus have heard of the following of which I have no experience: Macrium Reflect HDClone X.4 (Miray) Clonezilla Requirements are simple: Need to clone a Dell laptop internal NVMe to a P5 Plus onto its own partition (have got USB to M.2 enclosure), then install a new OS partition on the P5 so I can transition away from the Dell environment, then swap them over physically Need to clone an MX500 onto a Transcend 230S as I'm getting multiple random freezes and BSODs from the PC currently (WHEA Uncorrectables, Unexpected Store Exceptions) and I'm not sure if related to the disk being about to fail (Crucial Storage Executive and Crystal both report ill health on the drive but also huge numbers in terms of TBW, which is either unrealistic or a result of Game Pass unavoidably reinstalling entire titles just for simple update patches. Also unable to currently save crash dump files so Nirsoft blue screen analyser thing can't do its thing. Store Exceptions are apparently driver-related, but don't know how to tell which one) Need to be sure as much as possible that nothing will fall over during clone operation and become a paperweight in the event a crash occurs during cloning. Might have to do this whilst the MX500 is offline/plugged externally if necessary to avoid potential errors like this I also noted "need to restore from crashed state if possible" which may relate to the previous point, but I actually now have no idea what I might have been thinking at the time I wrote that Need to be able to use for regular and restorable (rather than just archive searchable) clone backups Option to use for incremental file backups and archiving Think that's it. Thanks in advance as always and welcome your input!
Acronis seems like the simplest option if you have it already. I've used the full version of Acronis for years and it hasn't let me down yet.
Nice one - cheers bud. Anything to be aware of or quirks in order to avoid unnecessary pitfalls when using?
Not used it for a while, but I recall it being quite straight forward. Just had it on a bootable USB, then point it at the drive to clone and the destination drive. Then from memory it lets you expand or reduce partition size based on the size of the drive you're copying to.
I've used the free Acronis before that came with an SSD too, seem to do the job quite painlessly. IIRC most of the time I've used some free Aomei stuff which worked well.
I have used Clonezilla in the past for a Windows 10 drive, cloning an external Windows 10 install to a larger internal SSD and it worked perfectly. It is pretty powerful with a lot of options. Bear in mind if you want to clone from a larger drive to a smaller drive, there are a few extra steps/flags you need to enable. I found the process to be pretty straightforward and well documented. There are plenty of YouTube guides as well if you prefer to follow along visually. Here is a guide I used for my Windows 10 drive:
