Cloning

Since many members had problems with cloning I made a Macrium clone of my W7 system to study the situation. Unfortunately there was nothing to study because it went perfectly and booted immediately.

I did, however, observe that the cloning took a LOT longer than an image from the same system - and that from a SSD to a SSD on eSata.

Another curiosity - when I was in the cloned system I emptied the recycle bin (which came from the original system). When I was back in the original system, the recycle bin was empty there too.

Making an image is faster than making a clone but, in my experience, using imaging to replace cloning (making the image and "restoring" it) takes longer and has the disadvantage of usually needing an intermediary drive. Being one step, cloning is as simple as start it, then walk away until it's done so the time really doesn't matter.

I keep my recycle bin empty (half the time I use SHIFT/DELETE and bypass the recycle bin on the way to file oblivion) so I've yet to notice the phenomenon you did.

The only times I had a clone fail was when Defraggler corrupted my HDD (I no longer use that POS) and, when I tried to clone the data on the corrupted drive, the clone failed even though I could access all the data on the corrupted drive (thank God for my anal backup scheme). The other time was when I was cloning from a notebook to a 2.5" 7200 rpm Western Digital Black in an enclosure. Even though the notebook had USB 3.0 ports, it apparently wasn't delivering enough power to keep the HDD running properly. The problem went away when I replaced the single cable with one that had three ends, the extra end being used to steal additional power from another USB port.