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We currently have a problem with our backup strategy. We use iMacs with Bootcamp and Windows 10. We want to store the Windows backups centrally. The recovery process should be done via a recovery stick: unbox new iMac, boot from stick and restore, done.

For this, we have tried different systems but in our test setup, we noticed an error that initially seemed trivial but now is a showstopper. The iMac serving as a source has a 512GB hard drive and the target a 1TB NVMe SSD, both have different sector sizes (the HDD 512B and the NVMe 4KB). If we now try to restore from the backup, the system fails with the error message that source and destination have different sector sizes. We initially thought of a bug in the program used - Acronis - and contacted the support. They told us (after more than a month) that restoring to different sector sizes was an unsupported feature. We then tried other systems like Veeam, Arcserve, and Windows Backup only to get similar error messages.

Additional tests with Clonezilla and Drive SnapShot also failed (but that was probably more of the EFI and Secure boot). Those tools should not be further discussed here as they don't meet the initial requirement for a centralized backup strategy.

What is the reasoning of not supporting different sector sizes? I guess it is a quite common scenario today restoring from a 1TB HDD to a 1TB SSD. Even if we replace the target with a standard PC with 1TB NVMe, we have the same problem. Thus I assume that the underlying problem is not directly related to the iMac in particular. How could we achieve our goal of restoring a backup no matter what the underlying sector size is?

I found two articles that seemed to be related to my question:

Both weren't helpful for my task. The second question contained a link to another issue related to the kind of disc access, so it may be a driver problem for NVMe disks.

CaldeiraG
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kockiren
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  • Acronis generates a sector by sector image. If the image is based off of 4K sectors, there isn’t any way to covert that, to 512 B sectors. Acronis cant simply divide a sector in 4 parts. 4kN HDDs drives should be compatible with the NVMe 4K sectors. Seems the simplest solution to your problem. – Ramhound Nov 15 '19 at 08:32
  • I would definitely look at Twocanoes They have several products, WinClone, BootRunner (paid) & MDS (free, but with paid support options) I've tried Acronis on both Mac & PC… meh. There's also Carbon Copy Cloner, but that requires manual partition setup. – Tetsujin Nov 15 '19 at 08:35
  • @ramhound: I'am not sure what solution you suggest, is your solution to change the sector size of the target nvme? – kockiren Nov 15 '19 at 08:50
  • @tetsujin: I will try Winclone 8 to clone the Image but as I can see there is no tool that matches my requirement for a centralized backup strategy or I'm wrong? – kockiren Nov 15 '19 at 08:53
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    No, sorry - only a manual copy/restore. I've never found anything yet that reliably can do that for Boot Camp, including restoring the hybrid MBR. These days I use Acronis only on the PCs & actually keep Paragon disk images of them on my Mac, which is then backed up to Backblaze… obviously not a daily solution. – Tetsujin Nov 15 '19 at 09:08
  • @tetsujin: we try winlcone 8 as you suggest and this works, we can create manual Backups / Snapshots and recover this snapshots to a new System with diffrent sectorsize. Now we need a Backupstrategy that is centralized and easy to use for a few computer. – kockiren Nov 20 '19 at 07:43
  • All I can think is to maybe use something like Acronis to run scheduled incremental backups from your start-point of a Winclone image. It could at least then run automatically. If recovery were needed, then it might be a case of Winclone to the new drive, Acronis to bring it up to date. – Tetsujin Nov 26 '19 at 10:13

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