Windows 10: How to switch backups from one drive to another

My computer had Windows 7 which I upgraded to Windows 10. I was using the Windows Backup program but my drive ran out of room and it had to stop backing up and gave me errors. Now I bought a new 8 TB usb external drive. I changed my settings to back up to that drive and it seems to be doing that correctly.


What should I do with the old backup files on my D: drive? They pretty much fill up that drive and I'd like to make some space on there. Can I simply cut and paste them into the folder containing the new backup sets on the new drive? Do I need them at all since I had a period of many months in which my system would not back up at all so they are out of date by now?


Diane

:)

 

Switch OS from one drive to another?

Macrium Reflect is my favorite (and it's also free!). It actually lets you skip the separate step of having to expand the partition when you're done... You can do the clone right on the target machine by creating a bootable CD/flash drive (WinPE) and booting right to it. Simply select the source drive, click "Clone this drive", then click "Cloned Drive Properties" and adjust the target partition size as desired. Then click Finish and let it do its thing. You can also image the source drive to a third drive (the image is stripped of space hogs like the page file and hiberfil.sys, and then compressed so the image will be much smaller than the source), and then restore it to the new drive.. This will give you a backup copy to restore from (albeit a snapshot from today unless you take periodic images) if the new drive fails down the road.

 

Backup from one external hard drive to another

I have a Dell Inspiron 15 laptop with the latest version of Windows 10. I have been backing up my photos from one external hard drive to another (both 2TB) using Windows
7 backup and restore for a few years. After copying all my images to a 5TB drive, and having another blank 5TB drive for backups, I tried to change the settings to reflect the
two new drives, but I'm not getting the option to back up from an EHD. I hoping someone can help or point me in the right direction. Thanks.

 

Query on switching Operating System from one to another Hard Drive

Hello Gilly,

Thank you for contacting Microsoft Community.

We understand your requirement in this regard.

• You mean to say, switching operating system to another hard drive?
• Are you concerned about changing drive letters?

If you say yes for the first question, then you can only do it by performing Clean Install. I mean, you need to take a backup of your both hard drives and need to Install Windows 10 on D: drive. However, there is no manual option to complete this operation.

Sometimes, you might also see problem with Windows 10 activation. Ensure that you should have a valid windows 10 product key, while performing Clean Install.

You can refer below help article provided by Andre Da Costa:

How to: Do a clean install of Windows 10

Let us know if you require further assistance.