Review by Dougie Fresh

I’ve been using this product quite a bit in this past year to clone hard drives to solid-state drives and it does a very good job.

To do this, you use the included disk to boot into the Acronis operating system from which you can choose to let it decide automatically for you the source and destination or manually. I always go with manual just to be sure that it does not get reversed somehow. One of the really nice features is you can have it do a proportional copy so that it will shrink the partition or expand it if the destination is smaller or larger than the source, respectively. The one gotcha here is that you do not want it to proportionally shrink the System Reserved partition. This partition should remain at 300MB because if it’s full or too small, Windows Backup will fail in the VSS service when this partition is full.

The one missing feature that is annoying is that it only supports MBR not GPT disks. For that you need an add-on pack. Because of this I was unable to clone a new laptop HDD to an SSD using this product. Reading the Acronis forums it seemed that even if you did get the add-on pack it might not work so I bought a different product for less than the add-on pack cost (EASUS ToDo Backup) and I was able to clone the GPT disk without issue.

It also has a nice secure erase features which comes in handy after cloning the hard drive if you’re planning to donate it or use it in a new system you are giving to someone else. It has a selection of algorithms it can use to securely erase the hard drive. The feature is under the utilities menu and depending on the algorithm you choose can take up to an hour.

I have not tried the backup and recovery features since I use a Windows Home Server 2011 system to do all my backups. For me though, the cloning and erasing features are worth it in themselves for upgrading my systems to an SSD or doing that for family/friends/neighbors.