User's Manual

Table Of Contents
135 Copyright © Acronis International GmbH, 2003-2020
12 Disk cloning and migration
This operation copies the entire contents of one disk drive to another disk drive. This may be
necessary, for example, when you want to clone your operating system, applications, and data to a
new, larger capacity disk. You can do it two ways:
Use the Clone disk utility (p. 135).
Back up your old disk drive, and then recover it to the new one (p. 91).
In this section
Disk cloning utility ........................................................................................................... 135
Migrating your system from an HDD to an SSD .............................................................. 139
12.1 Disk cloning utility
The Clone disk utility allows you to clone your hard disk drive by copying the partitions to another
hard disk.
Please read before you start:
When you want to clone your system to a higher-capacity hard disk, we recommend that you
install the target (new) drive where you plan to use it and the source drive in another location,
e.g. in an external USB enclosure. This is especially important for laptops.
Note: It is recommended that your old and new hard drives work in the same controller mode (for example,
IDE or AHCI). Otherwise, your computer might not start from the new hard drive.
Note: If you clone a disk with Windows to an external USB hard drive, you might not be able to boot from it.
We recommend cloning to an internal SSD or HDD instead.
The Clone disk utility does not support multiboot systems.
On program screens, damaged partitions are marked with a red circle and a white cross inside in
the upper left corner. Before you start cloning, you should check such disks for errors and correct
the errors by using the appropriate operating system tools.
We strongly recommend that you create a backup of the entire original disk as a safety
precaution. It could be your data saver if something goes wrong with your original hard disk
during cloning. For information on how to create such a backup, see Backing up partitions and
disks (p. 45). After creating the backup, make sure that you validate it.
12.1.1 Clone Disk wizard
Before you start, we recommend that you read general information about Disk cloning utility (p.
135).If you use an UEFI computer and you decided to start the cloning procedure under bootable
media, please pay attention to the boot mode of the bootable media in UEFI BIOS. It is
recommended that the boot mode matches the type of the system in the backup. If the backup
contains a BIOS system, then boot the bootable media in BIOS mode; if the system is UEFI, then
ensure that UEFI mode is set.
To clone a disk:
1. Start Acronis True Image 2021.
2. On the sidebar, click Tools, and then click Clone disk.
3. On the Clone Mode step, choose a transfer mode.