Trueimage 2016 vs Disk director, which one is best to clone a HD

Mark, welcome to these public User Forums.

I personally have never used Disk Director to clone any drives and rarely actually use it at all as it lacks support for many file systems that are common today, such as exFAT and EXT4.

ATI 2016 should be able to clone your hard disk but this may depend on what type of disks are involved in the cloning scenario?

One plea to make is that you should make a full disk backup of the source disk before attempting any clone operation!  This is your safety net in case anything goes wrong!

Personally, I use ATI to create regular scheduled Backup images of my own drives and avoid using cloning unless it is absolutely the only option!

With Backup you can keep an up to date image along with using incremental or differential backups so that you would lose the minimal amount of data in the event of a disk going bad etc.

Cloning is always going to be a manual operation as it cannot be scheduled, and it is also wasteful as it has to be a 1 to 1 duplication of one disk to a second one, whereas Backup enables me to store multiple copies on a single disk.

See my signature for more information on the differences between Backup and Clone.

See forum topic: [IMPORTANT] CLONING - How NOT to do this - which was written after dealing with many cloning issues in the forums.

See KB 56634: Acronis True Image: how to clone a disk - and review the step by step guide given there.

Note: the first section of the above KB document directs laptop users to KB 2931: How to clone a laptop hard drive - and has the following paragraph:

It is recommended to put the new drive in the laptop first, and connect the old drive via USB. Otherwise you will may not be able to boot from the new cloned drive, as Acronis True Image will apply a bootability fix to the new disk and adjust the boot settings of the target drive to boot from USB. If the new disk is inside the laptop, the boot settings will be automatically adjusted to boot from internal disk. As such, hard disk bays cannot be used for target disks. For example, if you have a target hard disk (i.e. the new disk to which you clone, and from which you intend to boot the machine) in a bay, and not physically inside the laptop, the target hard disk will be unbootable after the cloning.