On 1/8/2023 2:15 PM, august abolins wrote:

I think EaseUS will be my cloning tool of choice. It even
allows me to re-allocate the partition sizes *BEFORE* I do the
clone, if I want.

In this screenshot, I simply dragged the C partion boundary to
about 64GB (from its original 35GB, and it automatically
"borrows" from the unused H partition and resizes that
accordingly.

https://susepaste.org/12138178

So, it would seem that I could FIRST simply clone the hdd to
ssd as-is, install the ssd into the pc, boot, and THEN run
EaseUS to resize the partitions after that!

You can do anything you want, really.

It's up to you to decide whether you are worried about
wear of the SSD or not.

Doing all of the preparation on the HDD first, would make
for the easiest transition. Using an untested tool
and working with only your original HDD, is risky.
(Easeus is the tool that corrupted a FAT32 once.
Shit happens. The tools should do CHKDSK before they run.)

And, you should have a separate hard drive for backups. If you had
one of those, you might have more options for this procedure.

HDD --> Backup_HDD --> SSD # less risk, less wear
# original drive stays in original condition
# Then, much later...

Future_OS_partitions ==> save on (the freshly erased) backup_HDD
[ Backup tools store .img files with compression ]

I have enough HDD here, I can move the contents around on the
drives, and "free up" a HDD as a place for an intermediary copy.

There should always be a place in your plan, for a backup drive.

Remember, that when SSDs wear out, at least the Intel ones
brick on both reads and writes and Intel SSD drives become
non-responsive when the wear life expires. This provides an
incentive to make occasional backup images. The different drive
brands have different policies in this regard. I don't know of
any other brands, quite like an Intel one. I bought some
Intel 545s drives, and knowing this did not stop me from
buying them.

We implicitly trust SSDs now. Yet, when first installing one,
your backup frequency should be higher at first, until you
see whether your setup is "happy" with the thing. There are
occasional reports of "lost files" I cannot figure out. It
suggests something is not getting flushed to storage properly
at shutdown.

You can develop your own risk model, as you see fit.

I did not "trust" Macrium for the longest while, and
it takes a lot of test cases to be happy with any of
those tools. Macrium does some consistency checks before
it operates, and the track record ("stop on a dime" behavior)
seems to be pretty good. When Microsoft changed how NTFS
works, Macrium picked up on this right away and
reported "Error 9" instead of doing backups. It
hardly ever throws errors, during the actual operation.
(Restoring from a corrupted backup will throw an error... late
in the process -- you can stop this completely, by running
a time consuming Verify first).

Paul

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

I think EaseUS will be my cloning tool of choice. It even
allows me to re-allocate the partition sizes *BEFORE* I do the
clone, if I want.

In this screenshot, I simply dragged the C partion boundary to
about 64GB (from its original 35GB, and it automatically
"borrows" from the unused H partition and resizes that
accordingly.

https://susepaste.org/12138178

So, it would seem that I could FIRST simply clone the hdd to
ssd as-is, install the ssd into the pc, boot, and THEN run
EaseUS to resize the partitions after that!

--
../|ug

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

Hello Paul!

It's up to you to decide whether you are worried about
wear of the SSD or not.

I *am* kinda worried, but the deal has been done and the SSD
will be the upgrade. The original HDD will serve as the
initial backup, of course.

Doing all of the preparation on the HDD first, would make
for the easiest transition. Using an untested tool
and working with only your original HDD, is risky.
(Easeus is the tool that corrupted a FAT32 once.
Shit happens. The tools should do CHKDSK before they run.)

I had not heard of EaseUS being a problem, but I *do* have one
of the ealiest versions still residing on my XP pc.

And, you should have a separate hard drive for backups. If
you had one of those, you might have more options for this
procedure.

HDD --> Backup_HDD --> SSD # less risk, less wear
# original drive stays in original
condition

I know. The "plan" was to get a 4TB external HDD ($100) and
use that for image backups. But I haven't ordered that yet.

But the original HDD will technically serve as my initial
fallback should the SSD migration be problematic.

# Then, much later...

Future_OS_partitions ==> save on (the freshly erased) backup_HDD
[ Backup tools store .img files with
compression ]

Yes.. an HDD sounds more practical for the backup routine.

I have enough HDD here, I can move the contents around on the
drives, and "free up" a HDD as a place for an intermediary copy.

Nice.

There should always be a place in your plan, for a backup drive.

Operative word is "should". :/

Remember, that when SSDs wear out, at least the Intel ones
brick on both reads and writes and Intel SSD drives become
non-responsive when the wear life expires.

A friend of mine has had a 250GB Crucial SSD in play for 10
years on a laptop loaded with Linux, and various virtual
instances of other OSes, and Win 8.1. It has seen many
reinstalls and upgrades of his linux environment. He has
either been very lucky or, it is a testament that Crucial is
good quality brand - (at least 10 yrs ago! LOL)

We implicitly trust SSDs now. Yet, when first installing one,
your backup frequency should be higher at first, until you
see whether your setup is "happy" with the thing..

Yup. That's the approach I would apply as well, by instinct.

There are occasional reports of "lost files" I cannot figure
out. It suggests something is not getting flushed to storage
properly at shutdown.

That I had not heard of SSDs. Would that be perhaps to a
specfic technology of them like 1D vs 2D vs 3D vs 4D? And
would the problem be limited to the cheaper "too good to
believe in price!" SSDs?

I did not "trust" Macrium for the longest while, and
it takes a lot of test cases to be happy with any of
those tools. Macrium does some consistency checks before..

I might indeed begin with Macrium.

--
../|ug

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)