You lot kindly advised on what we might do about my wife’s huge iphone backup on her laptop

After much discussion and minimal action, she’s not going to get round to applying any of the sensible approaches so insead I’m going to fit a new ssd, big enough to at least postpone the problem for a long while

Got the disc, and a caddy (it’s M.2 if that makes a difference) so now what I need is “wot (?free) software for cloning ssds?”, please

The laptop has a proprietary recovery section and I’d like to copy that too, as well as the windows bits and all her files (including the redundant triplicate backups)

… thankingyow

I asked a similar question recently. The SSD I bought was a Samsung which has data migration (cloning) software available. I was really surprised at how quick and easy it was. Sure there’ll be generic cloning software available.

Cheers – seems yours may be the same as easeUS, so I’m trying a free trial of that

Macrium Reflex free edition works well.

AOMEI Backupper is also very good.

I recently cloned a small m2 drive to a larger one. First I had to put the new drive in the adaptor on the motherboard and the old drive in a caddy and boot from usb.

Which complicates it a bit. I forget the reason why exactly but something the clone software has to do to make the cloned drive bootable.

It’s counter intuitive to how you would clone older 2.5 / 3.5 inch drives.

Another happy Macrium Reflect user. Plenty of good tutorials on Youtube. Google your specific case to find a matching video, e.g. “Clone smaller HDD to larger SSD Macrium Reflect” to get a step by step. The recovery partition is often after the boot partition with all your stuff on it, so you expand that partition to fill the extra space as part of the cloning process.

Hmmm,

Easeus failing at 50-odd percent of the process

I haven’t taken the “old” ssd out as DrGnash mentioned – is that a must ? (the EaseUS video doesn’t show this being done)

Thinking I might try Macrium next then <makes pot of tea>

I’ve never heard of these drives before. M2 you say? Where do they go, they look like RAM sticks. Is it just a case of having a new enough laptop to take them?

Sorry OP, can’t help as my upgrade was a basic SATA. I did have to initialize the drive in Disk Management before the software would even see it though. But like I said, if your drive is Samsung, try their own Data Migration software.

M2 you say? Where do they go, they look like RAM sticks. Is it just a case of having a new enough laptop to take them?

Yes. They use a special socket and plug straight into the motherboard, but otherwise should act the same way as a regular SATA SSD.

Hold on here – you say m.2 but SATA or NVMe?

What have you bought and what does the laptop use? If they’re not the same you’re in for some trouble…

Also are they both the same length? Some laptops require the shorter ones.

should act the same way as a regular SATA SSD.

True if you have a m.2 sata drive but NVMe ones are (more) common too and are directly on the PCIe bus with no sata controller.

I bring this up as NVMe ssds are very common in laptops but m.2 caddies are normally sata (tho NVMe ones have recently become available).

I assumed nvme.

I bought a usb c enclosure that holds the nvme drive natively. My new drive was a crucial nvme drive whose website allows a download of a free version of their clone tool but will only work if one drive is crucial.

And importantly is clever enough to force you to have the destination drive connected to the motherboard directly. And the source disk in the caddy for good reason.

3rd Macrium Reflex – It has been great for me.

It’s NVME (both) and same size if I believe the videos I’ve watched for this model

Got Macrium to work in the end. I think that the existing drive must’ve had a dodgy sector or two, after googling the error reports from Macrium and EaseUS. Ran CHKDSK a couple of times, or at least tried but not entirely sure it really ran when rebooting (was bloody quick and no cmd window or report appeared). Fiddled with a couple of settings in Macrium and then half way through the process it built some sort of ISO file for itself and rebooted. Then it finished the cloning and reported itself “done”.

Going to install & see what happens.

And importantly is clever enough to force you to have the destination drive connected to the motherboard directly. And the source disk in the caddy for good reason.

Importantly I’m NOT clever enough to understand this – are you able to explain (as though you were talking to a ten year old ?)

If it works you don’t need to understand.

The software I was using required me to first install the new drive in situ. I.e replacing where the old smaller drive was installed.
Then you had to boot the laptop from the old drive connected to the laptop via usb and the caddy allowing the clone software to do its magic on the new drive. Once complete turn off. Unplug caddy and off you go booting from the new larger drive.

If it works you don’t need to understand.

I like understanding things though !
I’d read your comment as saying that it was better to do it “your” way but I’m not clear why (we both had to open up the case; difference was just timing)

Anyhow, new drive is in, apparently works fine and once I’d moved a partition around I’ve achieved the objective of buying myself another few years of ignoring my wife’s shoddy disk housekeeping without risking loss of her existing (probably superfluous) backups 😎

I’ve always found the free version of Macruim *reflect* to work well, so that’s what I’ve alwalys used. (other free cloning software is available)

It creates a bootable image and copies it to another drive, like a clone.

Then you can keep the other drive as a backup, or nuke it and relagete it to storage duty.