Backup a PCIE Hard Drive

I have a Desktop running win10pro with a
Western Digital WD BLACK SN750 NVMe M.2 2280 1TB PCI-Express 3.0 x4 64-layer 3D NAND Internal Solid State Drive,

I have only one program running on it( Besides OS ) just for work it only takes up 100Gb on the drive. I cant add a 2nd SSD . I have two spare SSD each 250 GB. laying around Question is this -> since I am only taking up110gb is it possible to clone or aback up the part of the WD BLACK with OS and Work Program onto one of the 250 GB SSD I do have a working copy of ACRONIS True Image & Clone. Not very Tech Savy,,
so any feedback is appreciated.

You can typically image a drive and place it onto another drive.

However, to go to a smaller drive from a larger drive you would want to shrink the partitions first on the larger drive to get them under 250GB.

One thing to keep in mind is that the NVMe drive will be much faster than the SSD drive. So you will not only be giving up drive space, but performance as well.

Thanks I just want it as a back up, system crashed on Fri Night had to wait till Sun afternoon till Dell could help me redo it and spend Sunday and Monday rebuilding work stuff, so wanted to make use of tone of the two SSD as a back up

You don't need to shrink any partition. Any intelligent backup program will only backup the used space - and even compress it so that it takes less space on the backup drive than it does on the installed drive.

thanks that should ease my mind and make life ezr

Macrium Reflect will clone any size drive to any other size drive.
The manual gives full instructions.
It works,I do it frequently.

joeandmarg0 said:

Macrium Reflect will clone any size drive to any other size drive.
The manual gives full instructions.
It works,I do it frequently.

Agree 100%! Macrium Reflect allows you to resize the partitions being cloned - you just can't resize the target below the amount of space used on the source.

joeandmarg0 said:

Macrium Reflect will clone any size drive to any other size drive.
The manual gives full instructions.
It works,I do it frequently.

Hi there.

Cloning means "Exact Copy". If you copy a disk to a smaller one (can only be done if there's sufficient space on the target of course) then that's an "Intelligent Copy" and not a Clone. Not understanding the difference here can cause to all sorts of problems when using these types of apps.

So CLONE -> 1:1 exact copy, blank sectors, bad data etc etc -- i.e everything.
Intelligent Copy -> only copies data so technically can copy to smaller HDD.

Cheers
jimbo

jimbo45 said:

Hi there.

Cloning means "Exact Copy". If you copy a disk to a smaller one (can only be done if there's sufficient space on the target of course) then that's an "Intelligent Copy" and not a Clone. Not understanding the difference here can cause to all sorts of problems when using these types of apps.

So CLONE -> 1:1 exact copy, blank sectors, bad data etc etc -- i.e everything.
Intelligent Copy -> only copies data so technically can copy to smaller HDD.

Cheers
jimbo

Then, jimbo, you might want to explain the difference to the people at Macrium Reflect, because they obviously do not know the difference. In the instructions from cloning a disk they show you how to resize partitions during the cloning process (steps 4 and 5 below):
Cloning a disk - Knowledgebase 8.0 - Macrium Reflect Knowledgebase

Macrium considers the difference between imaging and cloning to be whether the target is a single file (image) or one or more useable partitions on a target drive (cloning). Macrium defines different methods of cloning in their advanced options:
1. Intelligent sector copy which copies only the sectors in use on the source or
2. Forensic sector copy which copies all sectors from the source whether they are in use or not (and whether they are corrupted or not).

Aeomi Backupper also uses the same terminology:
Best Free Disk Cloning Software to Clone a Disk in Windows 10

It applies to clone all kinds of HDDs and SSDs, regardless of disk size, disk interface, and its brands, such as, clone large HDD to smaller SSD, clone HDD to Samsung SSD, clone SATA SSD, clone NVMe SSD, etc.

While you may not agree with the definition of cloning used by at least both Macrium and Aeomi, in order to avoid confusing users of this forum, perhaps it would be beneficial to stick with the definitions of cloning used by the major software companies. Using these programs, it is possible to clone partitions and drives and change the size of the partitions during the cloning process.

Whether the process uses intelligent cloning or forensic cloning are options in the cloning process.