Technostress.. a term I often use when attempting to deal with computer problems. I am far from being an expert on dealing with some of the more technical aspects of a computer, but do tend to be a do-it-yourself type of person versus having someone else do it for me and not understanding what they did. The plus, I might learn something new, the minus – technostress if I don’t know what I am doing! 🙂
Something that most photographers shooting digitally are going to face someday is running out of space on your main system hard drive. If you are storing your images on other external drives, this is often as simple as just buying another one. But as more software comes out for image organization, databases, Photoshop plugins, website tools, etc – this begins taking up space on your main program drive. Less free space may mean your programs begin to run a little slower. Your main program drive may even be divided up into different ‘partitions’ for the sake of keeping some of your data files separate from system and program files. So one single drive may be drive C:, D:, and E:. This is a common suggestion for larger hard drives in the event of a total system crash, only a portion of your data may be affected.
I had thought that migrating this over to a new drive was fairly simple, with very little technostress. Boy was I wrong on that one. I wanted to move from a 80 GB drive with 3 partitions to a 300 GB drive with similar partitions.   But the new drive just didn’t want to play nice and boot with no problems.
So just before I was about to give up on this endeavor, I thought there must be better software out there to handle such things in a more user friendly way for someone who isn’t a computer tech. There aren’t many drive ‘cloning’ programs out there, so I went on a few recommendations for Acronis TrueImage. On the software’s website, it had some verbage specifically about moving to a larger hard drive, so that got my attention! The manual for this software even has an entire chapter dedicated to step by step instructions on doing this very task.
To end a rather long story, this software worked like a charm. It cleaned up all of my tampering with the new drive, transferred all of my partitions, and booted up the first try! I am quite sure there was some user error in configuring the new drive with my older software, but TrueImage took a lot of that opportunity for me to mess it up out of the process with easy-to-understand instructions. Another tool that helped in this situation was an IDE to USB cable. Since I already had 2 hard drives filling the bays of my computer, this enabled me to hook up the new internal drive – externally to a USB port – temporarily until the transfer was complete. This reduced some of the swapping in and out of the computer.
If I have to go through this process again someday, with this software and the IDE to USB cable, it will only take me a fraction of the time I spent on my first time around. I suppose this is all in the learning process, and knowing how the right tools can make all the difference. So I can easily recommend these two tools for anyone wanting to upgrade their hard drive, and take some technostress out of the process..
- Acronis TrueImage – software that takes you through step by step cloning your old drive over to the new one (and also does automated backups – which we all should be doing!)
- IDE to USB cable – a cable that allows you to attach an internal drive, externally, for temporary transfer of data
Jim – funny you mention Mozy. I was just on their site last week checking them out. Backup frequency isn’t my issue – I do it at least once a week, more frequent if I am downloading or working on a lot of images. The offsite, hardware-free aspect of Mozy is what interested me, and their fees aren’t bad.
My main concern would be speed. Uploading 100s of Gigabytes of images would take awhile. I am sure most could happen overnight, but the initial backup I’ll bet would take days.
Mark,
One other thing you should look into if you want to totally remove your stress is proper backup.
I was terrible with backup before, maybe backing up every 4 or 5 months. That’s terrible!!
Until I found a really simple free service that backs everything up for you remotely. I don’t want to sound like a commercial and I know I’m gushing but it is really a great free service
They give you 2GB free. No credit card signup and everything happens in the background. Take a look.
http://www.mozy.com
Paul – actually I didn’t have to touch the registry at all. The only thing I forgot to mention was that I DEACTIVATED Photoshop CS2 and then REACTIVATED it on the new hard disk since CS2 tracks itself to the disk ID. I think it might have asked me for a reactivation anyway, but it also might have told me to call Adobe.
I really can’t emphasize enough how easy TrueImage made a task that I had already spent hours and hours struggling over.
Yes, Mark. That is certainly a tough task because not only do you have to move the files, you have to make sure that all of the registry entries are changed as well. It’s a gigantic pain.
I’ve done it before, but need to do it again sometime. I don’t look forward to it but I think that I’ll try your suggestions and make life easy on myself. 🙂