So my work laptop’s hdd kept running full and I had to regularly delete files and applications which I would not use on a every day basis. This resulted in reinstalling and redownloading files I needed every now and then. The solution to the problem was obviously upgrading the hard drive.
Sounds easy so far, but I could not afford the time needed to reinstall dozens of applications and plugins (let alone remembering everything I would need and finding it in the net). I asked my colleages about how they would migrate the system and I was told to use dedicated system imaging tools like Acronis and CloneZilla and then dedicated disk partitioning tools like GParted to do the job.
Was this really so cumbersome? Getting shitloads of tools, making bootable discs just to get my system written to an image? Manfred, one of my colleages then told me that Windows 7 can do all of this – easy and painless. All I would need is a backup USB drive to put the image on and make a Windows Repair Disc to play back the system image.
I gave it a try and it worked like a bliss! SURPRISE! All I needed to do after restoring the system image to the new hdd was resizing my partition to its maximum size which also was easily done with the built in Windows tool (and I didn’t even needed to reboot *gosh*). It took maybe 2 hours of which my laptop was blocked only one hour during system restore. The backup was done live in the running Windows OS.
To everyone who did not know (like me): System backup and restore can be done easily with Windows alone! Microsoft you are getting better. Slowly, but you do. Nice.
