So my 4 y.o. Solid State (System) Drive died, and I had to reinstall Windows cause somehow my backup

[mr_lebowski]

got corrupted (on my USB HD) ... it was a 9 y.o. freaking install ... man am I missing it ... that's a LOT of installed programs (esp. games ... over 100 counting my Steam library ... although the Program Files folder containing these games was on a separate spinner, a lot of 'em are likely to need to be D/L'ed again and re-installed, or just reinstalled if I have the files or discs) to deal with.

Not to mention I'm a super-picky computer nerd, there's TONS of settings and tweaks I've done ... all lost. It's gonna take me weeks ...

Anyways ... so I had to temporarily reinstall Windows to a extra spinner and wait for my Newegg-ordered SSD to arrive over the last week or so, and MAN ... it is ROUGH going back to a HD from an SSD for your Boot drive.

Ya ever tried it? FREAKING HELL you forget how slow they are!!!

Anyways, I imaged my new install, and it's in the process of restoring to my new 1TB SSD via Macrium Reflect (awesome free BU software, btw) ... I cannot WAIT to boot up on this f***** instead of the old Raptor X 150GB windows is on the last week

[lastlib]

1. Good Luck with the new rig!

Rebuilds are a total PITA!! I had to do one last year--even with all my backups, I lost a lot of my older programs. And it took forever to get my 12-y/o printer to work with the new OS.

[mr_lebowski]

2. Not a new OS, still Windows 10 so there's that ... took care of most of the basic stuff already

Over the past week. 9 years was a damn good run for one install, it started out W7 then I did the free upgrade ... it was probably 'time', ya know?

Also, I'm very much in the habit of keeping my C: drive relatively free of 'stuff I REALLY care about' ... got 3 other spinners in this box for my more permanent storage. Gonna start backing up one to the other though.

Anyways, the image/restore went swimmingly (Macrium Reflect is kick ass), I'm now talking to ya from my 1-week old install ... that's now living on the new SSD.

MUCH BETTER, way snappier, so noticeable

[lastlib]

3. I'm with ya on keeping the C: drive clear!

I set up partitions on my new hard drive. C: is OS only; D: is other installed programs; all DATA (photos, letters, spreadsheets etc.) files go on a separate drive, with weekly backups to my SSD. I only back up C and D when I make changes to them. I had a serious data loss several years ago, and I learned from it.

[Afromania]

4. I keep Steam on its own drive as well. Just redownload Steam and point it to your old drive.

You wont have to redownload everything but it'll go through that initial setup bit again.

[mr_lebowski]

5. That's what I was hoping ... been a LONG time since I re-installed Steam, couldn't remember

how good it was about being able to run games that've never actually been installed but just exist in your steam folder from a past install. Was very much hoping they'll fire up after brief install of stuff like C++ and Direct X runtimes.

I do believe you can (FINALLY) actually have >1 Steam folder now (on multiple drives) so you can put older games on your spinner and cycle in newer ones onto a boot ssd ... then I'm really hoping you can move them off to the spinner easily as they get old and you play 'em less or rarely. LIke, I hope that's built in to steam you don't have to futz with moving files yourself ... Again, guess I'll soon find out.

[Ron Obvious]

6. I clone my boot drive every few weeks for this exact reason

It's 2TB, so it takes a whole night, but the peace of mind is worth it. I then store the boot drive in the safe. AOMEI partition assistant is free and works great.

That's also how I upgraded to a SSD this past weekend, a simple clone, put in the new drive and you're done.

[hunter]

7. I recently installed a solid state drive in my desktop machine.

The first thing I noticed was the quiet. I hadn't realized how much noise the old Seagate hard drive made. I'd attributed a lot of that noise to the fans. I hope this ssd lasts longer than four years! It's nice how fast the ssd boots.

Backing up my machines is easy because I use Linux and I'm not a gamer. I don't have to muck about with proprietary software whenever I build a new machine or upgrade an old one. I keep multiple backups of my home directory, a couple hundred gigabytes, mostly family photographs and old home movies. I maintain the backups using grsync.

Linux systems installed on a USB stick are surprisingly transportable, and will boot all my amd64 machines to my preferred MATE desktop.

My laptop can be booted to Windows 10 but I don't use any Microsoft products unless someone is paying me. In Windows I mostly use Portable Apps. Those are easily transportable from one computer to another. Most will run on Linux as well, using Wine.

I'm possibly too obsessive about backups. I have files going back to the later 'seventies and emulators, as necessary, for most of the machines I've used since. I can still write Atari 800 programs and play Atari games like it's 1982. (Yeah, that's proprietary Atari software, but I still have all my Atari hardware, cartridges, and disks in a box in my garage.)

Good luck with your new SSD!