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Transfering Win7 (raid 0) files, to new Win10 puter (raid 10)

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Tell me if I'm on the right path here....

(in hindsight, raid 0 seemed risky, so I'm going with raid 10 on my new (win10) computer)

 

From what I understand, I copy everything from the old win7 computer to an external drive.

(C-drive, raid 0 drive, and all other drives or partitions)

Then I configure my brand-new Win10 computer for raid 10 (and maybe some partitions)

....then pick-and-choose what I want to paste/transfer to the Win10 computer,  from the external drive (except programs and program-related files, system files, etc...)

(good thing is, my Acronis Cloud backup shows my raid 0, as one single drive)

 

Questions:

But some files are program-specific....so would I install all my needed programs (to their current Win10 releases)...then the associated files ? (Open Office, Adobe subscriptions, etc....)

What about Acronis TI 2018 and my Acronis Cloud ongoing subscriptions ? Would I need to find it's activation key ?

Is there an easier way ? ... or is it just a couple long nights and some coffee ?

 

Thanks !!

 

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First thing first... do a full disk backup of your existing OS drive on the new and old system - preferably local so that you have direct and easy access to them which will speed things up for recovery! Backup each entire physical disk (or RAIDed disk), including all partitions.  Worse case, if things go south, you can revert back with those images to exactly how things are now and give yourself an opportunity to try something else later.  

But some files are program-specific....so would I install all my needed programs (to their current Win10 releases)...then the associated files ? (Open Office, Adobe subscriptions, etc....)

Unfortunately, there is no way to restore an entire disk and migrate from Windows 7 to Windows 10 - it's all or nothing and Acronis is not an application or user profile migration tool.  And it makes no sense to migrate Windows 7 to your new Windows 10 system (especially if they're both OEM licenses and Win 7 is going EOL soon too).

The best you're going to be able to do is build your new Win10 system from scratch and manually install your applications and configure your OS settings how you want and take it as a "fresh start".  Then start new Windows 10 backups moving forward as well.  As for the current Windows 7 backups, you can absolutely migrate your raw data from your older Win7 backup (things like documents, files, music, pictures, videos).  That can be restored anywhere you please.  Basically though, you'll be installing all apps from scratch and going through the process of licensing them, etc.

HOWEVER... there are some things you can import from your backup too.. for instance, if you use Chrome, or Firefox as your main Internet browser, you can actually copy the the appdata folder for those programs in your old backup into your new profile and they will then be exactly as they were before:

i.e. 

C:\Users\xxxxxxxxxx\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default

Unfortunately, it's tough to say what you can manually bring over this way since a lot of applications have a lot of other moving parts in the registry, the default installation locations, user profile, etc.  So, for the most part, plan to just install, license and configure.

What about Acronis TI 2018 and my Acronis Cloud ongoing subscriptions ? Would I need to find it's activation key ?

Just install it and log in with your Acronis account.  Once logged in, it should license on the new system automatically and you'll see the old backup show up in the console automatically.  That may disable the backup capability of the old one, but you'll still be able to restore from it (at least for 30 days if you only have a single license).  

Is there an easier way ? ... or is it just a couple long nights and some coffee ?

Yeah, it's going to be a couple of long days to get fully setup, but mostly because you're making the leap to a brand new OS and there's no magic pill for this change.  There are applications that say they can migrate an entire user profile and certain applications, but they have all failed miserably for me and that was just migrating to the same OS.  In this case, it's going to be better, to just bite the bullet and get a fresh start here.  After that though, the "major' upgrades in Win10 go pretty smooth and will be a lot easier to restore if you need to.

 

Great help.

Much appreciated,  Thanks !!

At some point, my Win7 computer will be disabled because I'm robbing some parts from it for the Win10 machine (PSU, optical drive, etc)

 

So, do two "full" backups... one on the current win7 machine (so it's current), and then do one onto my (blank) outboard USB drive. ...... uncompressed.

Is this virtually the same as copy/paste-ing everything onto the outboard USB drive, except Acronis keeps everything organized the way I previously had it ? (easier to find stuff)

(UPDATE)........ I did a full Acronis backup to the Outboard drive, and it seemed to work. It appears that most or all my drives and files and other data got back'd-up, and all drives (I don't have partitions) are found there under one giant " .tib " file..... 600+ gigs.

Good.

One backed-up drive said "system reserved", and it contained boot related files.

I can access any of it.

Once Acronis is on the new Win10 machine, I assume it can open it easily.....as it will recognize  the " .tib " extension.

 

So far I am happy :)

 

Does it matter if there is one giant " .tib " file ? .......or should I start over and tell Acronis to backup "one drive at a time" ??

....so there are several smaller  ".tib " files ?

 

 

 

Personally, I think it is easier to handle each physical disk in it's own backup.  That way, when it's recovery time, you can restore just the disk you need to and handle them separately if you need to resttore.  If you have multiple disks in one backup and only need to restore the OS, sometimes having to deal with the other partitions gets confusing.  Likewise, if you only need to restore a data drive, better not to even bring the OS into the recovery - just in case - you don't want to accidentally restore the entire thing.  Basically, keep it simple, and in this case, it's actually easier to have each physical disk as it's own backup instead of having multiple disks in one backup.

As for the size of a .tib - that's also really preference.  I don't like having any super large single files as they are harder to transfer or copy down the road. Why copy 600GB (if the task is needed) if you only need 100GB if it was separated out.  

Also, the backups, by default, will be just one file - as large as it needs to be.  But you can set them to a specific size.. For instance, I set my max .tib size to 25GB (just to try and make copying files to my NAS more efficient).  So instead of say 1 x 100GB .tib, I end up with 4 x 25GB tibs.  The caveat is that you need to make sure those pieces always live in the same folder as each other so it can read them all when it comes time to recover.

Bobbo_3C0X1 wrote:

Personally, I think it is easier to handle each physical disk in it's own backup.  .... 

I would follow Bobbo's advice on this - As far back as I can remember I have taken this approach. Sometimes where there are multiple partitions on the one disk I do separate backups for each partition.

Ian