Live Cloning

DeaconFrost

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Sep 6, 2007
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How is the state of live cloning? I have a operations center that doesn't like downtime, and I wanted to clone one of the workstations from a 500 GB spinner to a 1 TB SSD. I see that Acronis True Image claims to be able to clone a running system to an external USB drive (which could be the SSD), minimizing my downtime.

How well does that work? Is there better software? Ideally, I'd love to let the cloning run, and when finished, power off, swap the drives, and power back up.
 
How is the state of live cloning? I have a operations center that doesn't like downtime, and I wanted to clone one of the workstations from a 500 GB spinner to a 1 TB SSD. I see that Acronis True Image claims to be able to clone a running system to an external USB drive (which could be the SSD), minimizing my downtime.

How well does that work? Is there better software? Ideally, I'd love to let the cloning run, and when finished, power off, swap the drives, and power back up.
You have a better chance of doing it with sheep. :eek:
 
I would like to know of some proven solutions as well. We have computers at work that run multiple test stations that may run for 15-30 days at a time. There is never any down time unless the hydraulic pumps go down. Options are limited since the machines are currently airgapped (until my request for a test lab network goes through).
 
Take a look at this. I've used their software in the past (although not the live clone feature) and it works well.

https://www.ubackup.com/features/disk-clone.html

"AOMEI Backupper provides the corresponding function of disk clone, which can clone one disk to another without breaking off the running operating system (It is called "Live Disk Cloning"). That is to say, it can clone while you are working on the computer."
 
Any of the good cloning software for windows uses the shadow-copy feature in Windows.

The Samsung data migration tool works perfectly. I have used it multiple times and never had any issue. Clone drive, power down system, remove old drive, install new drive if you had it hooked up via USB to clone, boot up with new drive.

It really is that simple.
 
I use Paragon's Migrate OS to SSD which is now part of their Hard Disk Manager program.
I've had nearly 100% success rate, did over 100 clones since 2012 with the program and had maybe 2 not work.

I used the Samsung Magician program when I got my 1TB 860 and it failed twice. Fired up Paragon and 15 minutes later I was up and running on the 860. Wasted almost an hour with the Samsung app.
 
How is the state of live cloning? I have a operations center that doesn't like downtime, and I wanted to clone one of the workstations from a 500 GB spinner to a 1 TB SSD. I see that Acronis True Image claims to be able to clone a running system to an external USB drive (which could be the SSD), minimizing my downtime.

How well does that work? Is there better software? Ideally, I'd love to let the cloning run, and when finished, power off, swap the drives, and power back up.
Sounds like you need to set these server hosts up in the future on a vmware infrastructure where you can snapshot or clone at will. You can migrate everything live from host to host without issue.
 
Sounds like you need to set these server hosts up in the future on a vmware infrastructure where you can snapshot or clone at will. You can migrate everything live from host to host without issue.
These aren't servers. They are physical machines. We have over 400 servers in our ESXi environment running on two vBlocks. I'd love to have these workstations act as dumb terminals connecting in to a virtualized setup, but they need between 4 and 8 displays running on each.
 
Did the migration not long ago from a Samsung 250GB SSD to a 1TB Evo 970. It didn't go that smoothly for me...

First, I tried the Samsung magician. Yeah it's a magician alright, so long as you're looking for a shitshow. It would get to 99% and then tell me 'clone failed'. No reason, no explanation. Never did figure out why because using different software was quicker than troubleshooting that hot mess.

Next I tried AOMEI and yes it worked ...sort of. I got an image on my 1TB of my system drive with a partition size of 250GB. The remainder of the drive would have to be partitioned as a separate drive and windows would not extend the images partition. Probably because it is a system partition. I couldn't find the option to change partition size with AOMEI. Maybe I'm just stupid.

I finally settled on macrium. It works well, just took a YouTube tutorial to figure out how to change destination partition size but hey it worked.
 
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