I want to install Windows 7 on my computer, but the rumor around the campfire is that you can’t upgrade-- you have to wipe your hard drive and do a clean install. What’s the best way to save all of my files before doing this? I have an 8gb USB drive that, believe it or not, would almost fit it all, but it’s all effed in the head so I don’t really trust it. I could burn a bunch of CDs, but I have a few videos of my kid that are too big to fit, and that’d be a pain in the ass anyway. I don’t have a DVD burner. I’m thinking about just buying 1 month of an online backup service.
An online backup service would work, sure. USB flash drives have gotten very cheap, as well. I recently bought an 8GB for $22 from Best Buy, so that’s also worth some consideration.
What version of Windows are you upgrading from? If it’s Vista, you can indeed do an in-place upgrade. Alternatively, you can do a non-destructive repartition of your hard drive, create a drive D:, and copy your files there for a bit. Vista supports this out of the box. You can also use something like PartedMagic, which is a free alternative to Partition Magic.
If you’re really talking about 8GB or less, you could burn CDs as you suggested. It would only be 10-11 CD-Rs, which are dirt cheap.
It’s worth considering either an external USB disk, adding another internal HD, or using an online backup provider as you mentioned. If you’re asking this question, you’re probably not already backed up, right? If you have anything important stored on your disk… data recovery can often be quite expensive. Online backup solutions protect against disaster and theft, but bandwidth is a consideration. It will take a while to initially upload all your data, unless you have superlative bandwidth. Also, many ISPs have bandwidth caps nowadays which may be a consideration.
You don’t necessarily have to wipe the disk. It depends on what OS you are coming from. That said, I think a clean install is always best, even if you don’t necessarily have to do it.
I’d recommend getting an external drive. Use it to transfer all of your stuff, and then use it as a backup device in case your hard drive fails. Right now you are one tiny hardware problem away from losing all of your videos and important data.
Always back up your stuff, or one day there’s a good chance you’ll lose it.
Not quite. An install of Windows 7 over XP will preserve data (as long as you tell Windows to NOT format the disk) but not applications or settings. You can transfer settings - favourites, cookies, and the like by using Windows Easy Transfer in combination with an external storage device.
But having a backup is a good idea anyway.
Probably the best way to upgrade is to get an external backup device, back up your machine to that, then use Windows Easy Transfer to save your data. Then take out your existing HDD and put it in a safe place and put in a brand new HDD and install Windows7 on that. That way you can recover just by reinstalling the old HDD.
Thanks, Quartz, I will file that in my tips for updating.
On another point, has the OP run the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor? Some computers that run XP just fine are not good candidates for upgrading to 7 because they lack sufficient RAM or a fast enough processor, or there are other hardware limitations that may impact the success of the upgrade. In my experience, a minimum of 2Gb of RAM is required for acceptable performance.
and for software, I like DriveImage XML. You can later browse the image and pick off just what you need, or restore the entire drive if the “upgrade” was not all you hoped for.
Well if you want you COULD upgrade from XP to vista then vista to 7 but that is just asking for trouble, backup all files on a USB drive or an iPod and jsut do a clean wipe
This is the guide that I went by when I did my upgrade. The Windows Easy Transfer program is essential, but it has the ability to produce a huge backup file. So I’d strongly recommend an external hard drive to stash it on.
Another option: by a new internal hard drive for your computer and start from scratch with Windows 7. Then, install the current XP drive as a secondary drive and copy files over at your leisure.
This way, you never wipe the current drive. If you realize that in two months that you forgot to copy over some configuration or bookmarks list or something, you’ll have everything still available in pristine form. And, you can always switch which drive you boot to, if ever necessary. Finally, you’ll have a second hard drive in place that you can use to back up future files to (either file-by-file or, when you’re ready to pull the trigger, a complete disk image of the Windows 7 drive).
I think this is the safest and most cost effective solution. Storage is so cheap that unless you’re on a very tight budget, an external hard drive will preserve your data and do it cheaply and, mostly reliably.
However HDD’s do die - sometimes prematurely - so while it may sound like overkill, I would backup the data to 2 separate types of media. Even 2 HDD’s would be fine. For example, if there is a lot of space free on your current drive, you could create a non-bootable partition and back the data up there as plan A and then back it up again to the external drive as plan B.
Since you only need a bit more space than the 8gig you mentioned, a second backup media could be some type of flash card (SD, SDHC, memory stick, etc.). You can get a 16gig SDHC card that is fairly fast for about $30.
If you have some extra time and don’t mind experimenting a bit, you can also try cloning your existing system (OS plus all applications) to a virtual machine. VMWare has a free virtual machine called VMWare player I think. It will let you create a virtual machine that is an exact clone of your present system. You could then run that VM under the new W7 OS by just installing the correct version of the VMPlayer software. This would give you the best of all possible worlds.
Another free product that will clone your system is Paragon’s Go Virtual. I think it creates a VM that VMPlayer can use, but I haven’t played with either product yet.