Quick-Cloning a Hard Drive

Why can't Microsoft provide an easy way to upgrade a disk?

I recently had occasion to upgrade a system drive on a simple server box (no fancy RAID arrays) to a new drive with much higher capacity, lower power consumption, and lower noise. I reviewed the Windows options for performing this operation: 1) Make a full backup to a local hard drive, DVD drive, or network share, 2) install the new drive, 3) reboot to DVD, 4) make a full restore. Definitely better than the Server 2003 procedure, which would have required an OS reinstall, but still not ideal for my situation.

To start with, I didn’t have a fast extra local hard drive handy. I could back up to DVD, but it would have taken several DVDs. I could do a network backup from the command line using WBADMIN, but that would have been fairly slow, and would have also slowed down the network for others. What I really wanted to do was something like this: 1) pop in the new drive, 2) clone the old drive to the new drive at local bus speed, 3) remove the old drive, 4) reboot to the new drive. However, remarkably, no facility exists in Windows to perform this sequence of events.

Acronis has two fine products that will do the job: TrueImage, and the smaller and cheaper Migrate Easy. I tried Migrate Easy, and it was a dream. The job was done in record time with no errors, no problems, no “gotchas”, no changing of DVDs, no slowing down the network, no scrounging for a “scratch” hard disk. Of course I could also have used Ghost, the old standby, which also works very well.

So why can’t Microsoft include a simple disk cloning function in Windows? Isn’t that a much more basic and appropriate operating-system capability than, say, the ability to see window contents while dragging? I would love to see Microsoft start paying attention to more real-world server management scenarios like simply cloning a volume to a new disk with more capacity. As the Acronis folks prove, it doesn’t have to be all THAT hard!

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• Acronis
• backup
• disk cloning
• ghost
• restore
• Server 2008