Macrium versus Acronis in cloning laptop drive. Seems a difference

pcumming said:

And it will boot either way correct?
Never used Macrium which is why I ask.
Acronis insists that you put the disk to be cloned--TO- in the laptop and the -FROM- as USB connected. Macrium does not appear to have this restriction in my reading.

Thank you in advance.
Peter

Macrium is far superior product at least the paid version and AFAIK Acronis does not have a free version. In MR v7 all you have to do is use a drive connected via any method and click Clone Drive in MR. There is no need to remove the drive from your laptop.

Samuria said:

Welcome to the forum. It doesnt realy matter which way you do it at the end of the day its just a simple copy of one drive to another and any cloning software will work the same

Actually, this is not the case. Some inferior cloning softwares do not make identical clones, and do not copy all hidden partitions. Acronis and Macrium do make identical copies.

pcumming said:

Macrium versus Acronis in cloning laptop drive. Seems a difference

I have used Acronis for years. In order to clone a laptop drive I have been told to take out the internal laptop drive and attach via USB. Then put drive I want to clone TO in the laptop. Then I would boot with the Acronis USB media I had created. I would clone from the Source (external USB former internal laptop drive) to the laptop drive I just inserted. When done I would remove the USB cable and could boot directly from the drive in the laptop if desired. Have tried this and it works fine using Windows 8.1 (Do not have Win 10 at this time).

Macrium--from what I read in several places (I do not own software yet) you DO NOT have to take out the current internal laptop drive and attach as USB. You would simply attach a new or previous drive to the laptop via USB then run the clone option. This will create a bootable drive that when done I could insert in the laptop to boot.

Is this correct?

Thank you very much
Peter

With Macrium, you can simply clone from internal to external drive, and then swap as you say. You do not even need to boot from a Macrium Rescue drive.

To do same with Acronis, if you are correct, you would need to boot from an Acronis drive to clone.

Take it from regulars here, Macrium is the preferred product by far for domestic users, and the free version is fine for most users.

storageman said:

The reason Acronis wants you to perform the clone as described by the OP, is that it reduces the chance that you re-boot your system with both drives attached which everybody knows causes problems to the cloned drive. You can run the Acronis clone process under windows just like Macrium. Now I have not done it in a couple of years, since switching to Macrium, but it did work. Maybe they have changed ( but I don't think so).

Yeah I think this is correct from memory but cannot be certain as I have not use Acronis for several years mainly due to being ripped off for upgrade costs only a few months after buying it. I was hacked off as the 2013 build (iirc) had more bugs than a jungle, and many users complained about it so they bought out a paid upgrade rather than a free fix under terms of licence saying it was outside warranty period (and I had only had it about 4 months).

Macrium Reflect became my de facto tool thereafter and never had a single restore failure across variety of pcs/tablets.

Frankly Acronis are not interested in individual users targeting the corporate market.