Wow!  Can you believe it?  Western Digital is offering their own “WD Edition” of Acronis True Image for free download that features:

– Drive Cloning
– Drive Migration
– Drive Deployment
– Drive Image Backup
– Drive Image Recovery
— and more…

In addition, it is designed to create optimally aligned partitions on WD Advanced Format Drives (see my original post).  I visited the Acronis & Paragon web sites, and neither mention or acknowledge that they have updated their current software versions to handle Advanced Format Drives.  That means if you use either of these programs to clone a HDD to a WD Advanced Format HDD, you’ll still need to run Western Digital’s alignment utilities on the cloned HDD when you’re through  — even with Vista or Windows 7.  BUT… if you use Western Digital’s version of Acronis True Image to clone your HDD to an Advanced Format Drive, you’ll be set & won’t have to run the alignment utility.

Western Digital’s version of Acronis True Image will (hopefully) provide a complete solution to HDD cloning; migration; backup; and recovery.  I say “hopefully”, as I haven’t tried it yet.  I downloaded the 100MB file, but I already have Acronis True Image Home v11 software installed on my desktop (and it knows diddly-squat about “Advance Format Drives”).

I would assume that Western Digital’s version of Acronis True Image only works with Western Digital HDDs, but this is still fantastic!  IMHO, hard drive manufacturers should have been providing software such as this from the beginning.  We — the customers — buy their hard drives to store all of our precious data on them.  Why must we purchase 3rd party software to clone, migrate, backup & recover data from their HDDs????

Anyway’s… KUDOs to Western Digital!!!

You can download the User Manual for “Acronis True Image WD Edition” here.

Now… if they would just add a disk partitioning tool or partition manager, I’d truly be a happy man!

  • Side Note:  I originally wrote “happy as a clam” (vs. “a happy man”),  but I got to thinkin’ — what does “happy as a clam” even mean???   What does adding a disk partitioning tool to WD software have to do with “happy clams?”  I’ve been using that phrase (verbally) for most of my adult life, without a clue as to what it even means.  It was only when I typed it out here that it hit me… WTF does that even mean???  The only thing “happy” about a clam that I can think of has to do with ‘bearded clams.’  Well.. I googled the phase & found out that it really refers to “happy as a clam in high water,” which is when they are safe from predators.  Golly gee whiz!  After all these years I’ve learned yet something else!!!