Even though Microsoft started up as a company that produced "Disk Operating System", AKA "DOS", its latest Windows operating systems no longer manage some of the basic disk operations, say cloning a hard disk.
But nowadays, migrating from old hard drives to new SSD drives requires that you clone existing drives to the new SSD drives. Microsoft has made sure that any of its backup/restore features cannot be used for drive copy or cloning. So you will need some tools from other software vendors.
Some SSD drive manufacturers such as Samsung offer software for such migration. But Samsung's software is simply horrible. It takes over one hour and twenty minutes to copy an old 500 GB drive to its 1 TB EVO SSD drive. Then at the end of the copy it throws an error and gives up.
You are on your own.
I bought Paragon Software's cloning tool before when I migrated a Windows 7 machine. $20 is not a bad price. But now when I need to upgrade a Windows 8.1 machine, I found that I needed to upgrade, and Paragon Software's download link only provide the old version.
It looks like that I need to pay again.
Then I saw recommendations for "AOMEI Backupper (http://www.backup-utility.com)". The drive clone feature in this software can be enabled either by payment, or with a message in your social media account such as Facebook or G+, etc. that mentions "AOMEI Backupper". So I posted a message in G+, and then I migrated two of my Windows 8.1 machines to new SSD drives, free.
Everything worked perfectly.
I will be migrating a MacBook next. But apparently MacBook can be migrated without third party tools.
Microsoft: you are really losing it.
Update: apparently AOMEI Partition assistant is no longer available for free with a post to social media. It will now cost you $50.
Saturday, December 6, 2014
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