New hard drive coming, best way to transfer settings?


Recommended Posts

I have 8.1 currently.

I'm happy to clean install Windows 8.1 On the new drive but how should I go about restoring as many Windows settings as possible?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You may be able to do a direct disc copy. 

I know western digital drive's you can download a free Acronis HD utility that will allow you to copy one drive to another. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

just create a system restore image (under file history) and use a recovery drive, everything will be passed into your new drive.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I just put the old drive in after install and copy what I want to keep. 8.0+ settings will sync if you don't have that turned on.

Useful location paths to backup/copy:

%localappdata% (\users\<username>\appdata\local\)

%appdata% (users\<username>\appdata\roaming\)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Can you give an example of these settings your wanting to transfer? Having a difficult time coming up with more than a handful of things that should take all of a couple of minutes to redo, so not sure worth the hassle of any sort of transfer, etc.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Can you give an example of these settings your wanting to transfer? Having a difficult time coming up with more than a handful of things that should take all of a couple of minutes to redo, so not sure worth the hassle of any sort of transfer, etc.

+1

 

installing Office on an SSD takes all of 5 minutes, even the installation of an OS takes about 10-15 minutes at most.

Then, transferring files - is horrid if connecting via USB, hopefully you have USB3 or cloud storage and a speedy conxn

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If you log into your machine using a Microsoft Account (as opposed to a regular local user accounts), there's already a ######-ton of settings that are persisted online and will propagate back to any machine you subsequently log back into using that same account.

 

As others have said, can you provide us with examples of settings you want to transfer?  It could very well be that everything you care about is already going to be transferred back automatically.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.