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tanker27
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A little help, please.....

Mon Jun 20, 2016 7:09 am

So this weekend I grabbed another 500GB SSD that I want to use for my games. Right now I have all my games installed on a 2TB HDD and I would like to move them to the SSD without having to go through the motions of reinstalling everything.

On the HDD everything is pretty much nice and neat: Steam/Steam Games, BattleNet/Blizzard Games, GOG Galaxy/Games, EAOrigin/Games, and Games. I know I probably can use some sort of cloning software and clone everything over but there are other things on that drive I don't want to move.

So my question is what's the best way to do this? Is there cloning software out there that lets me pick and choose what to clone? Or do I just need to suck it up and reinstall everything? (geez the thought of that would be hours and possibly days)

Thanks for the tips in advance.
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Aranarth
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Re: A little help, please.....

Mon Jun 20, 2016 7:20 am

I believe the paid version of macrium reflect will let you pick and choose.

Alternately, move what you don't want to copy to a backup drive and then clone the drive with the free version of macrium.
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esc_in_ks
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Re: A little help, please.....

Mon Jun 20, 2016 7:24 am

Last time I needed to do this, I used Clonezilla (free) to clone a smaller SSD to a larger SSD. Then, in Windows, I expanded the filesystem to take up the rest of the free space. No issues doing it that way. It's been a while, but at least this is non-destructive, so you have little risk of causing any problems as long as you're careful with your cloning and choose the right devices!
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Re: A little help, please.....

Mon Jun 20, 2016 7:25 am

Aranarth wrote:
I believe the paid version of macrium reflect will let you pick and choose.

It will. It's how I back up 3 TB in 2 separate chunks on 2 TB drives.
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tanker27
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Re: A little help, please.....

Mon Jun 20, 2016 7:35 am

Captain Ned wrote:
Aranarth wrote:
I believe the paid version of macrium reflect will let you pick and choose.

It will. It's how I back up 3 TB in 2 separate chunks on 2 TB drives.


Awesome! Grabbing Macrium Reflect Now!
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Re: A little help, please.....

Mon Jun 20, 2016 7:53 am

esc_in_ks wrote:
Last time I needed to do this, I used Clonezilla (free) to clone a smaller SSD to a larger SSD. Then, in Windows, I expanded the filesystem to take up the rest of the free space. No issues doing it that way. It's been a while, but at least this is non-destructive, so you have little risk of causing any problems as long as you're careful with your cloning and choose the right devices!

This would be great if he wasn't going in the opposite direction (larger device to smaller one)!
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Glorious
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Re: A little help, please.....

Mon Jun 20, 2016 8:21 am

It might be easiest to change drive assignments, and just copy relevant parts of the filesystem.

That is, if the 2TB HDD is D:, copy the parts of the directory structure you care about over the SSD (which is temporarily like F: or something), re-assign the HDD to E:, then change the SSD to be become the new D:.

This should be transparent to steam/blizzard/Origin, etc...

Like, if you have steam at D:\Steam (and therefore the installed games at D:Steam\steamapps\common), you just copy that entire thing over. You can either uninstall the games you don't want from the HDD first, or you can pick and choose which games in \steamapps\common you want to move. Steam handles that just fine (they obviously just won't be listed as installed in Steam anymore when you start it back up).

I've done something like this several times in my life.
 
tanker27
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Re: A little help, please.....

Mon Jun 20, 2016 8:52 am

Hmmm.....that looks to be good too.

However looking at the Macrium knwoledge base it looks like its just as easier to Identify what folders I want to backup, create backup file, Drop that backup on to the new SSD and then rename its a D: and rename the older HDD to E: or F:.


(I know steam handles copies well because in the past I have moved it from a smaller HDD to larger ones, its the others I am not too sure about.)
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Re: A little help, please.....

Mon Jun 20, 2016 8:54 am

tanker27 wrote:
Hmmm.....that looks to be good too.

However looking at the Macrium knwoledge base it looks like its just as easier to Identify what folders I want to backup, create backup file, Drop that backup on to the new SSD and then rename its a D: and rename the older HDD to E: or F:.

As long as you don't have anything that is relying on the stuff you DON'T copy over being located on D: that should work.
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tanker27
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Re: A little help, please.....

Mon Jun 20, 2016 8:58 am

I'll be careful, I've kept my file systems pretty clean and straight forward for that fact, no other dependency except........ The only part that worries me are my saves that for some unknown reason are located c:/users/saves (or somesort) I am just hoping that they will resolve itself and I dont have to do anything wonky like reconnecting that folder.
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Re: A little help, please.....

Mon Jun 20, 2016 10:45 am

As long as your game clients are shut down before you do the move and drive rename, they won't see a difference and everything will work smoothly.
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tanker27
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Re: A little help, please.....

Mon Jun 20, 2016 11:59 am

Got it! :D
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Re: A little help, please.....

Mon Jun 20, 2016 12:00 pm

Why not just use Symbolic links through "Symlink /J"

If you want to move specific folders, and don't want to move or change the whole drive letter, you can always mount the new drive as a new letter and just use symbolic junction links to the new folder positions. That's how I have moved games both off and onto my SSD, etc. This is basically a way to tell the filesystem to look on a different location when any program ask for a folder. On any programs using the normal filesystem, this is transparant as well.

You always have the options to just copy everything to the new drive and switch the driver letters. The programs themselves shouldn't matter as long as they aren't started at the time of switching letters. This would probably be a better option if you can fit most of what you need as installed programs on the same drive. The thing is that basically, anything having been installed either needs to have it's path changed in the registry and any settings files, or reside on same drive it was installed on. As long as it's pure data, copy or clone really doesn't matter much though.

I've symlinked several games both to and from my SSD. Since then, I have also migrated my SSD into a larger one and used Intels data migration tool (specific version of acronis) and it's worked terrific through that.

If you have something(in my case SC2) installed under C:\Games\, and just want to move the data to D:\Games
* Copy the folder as it is so it resides under D:\Games\
* open a command promt with administrative rights.
* run the following command when standing in C:\Games\
> mklink /J "StarCraft II" "D:\Games\StarCraft II"

Ding, everything will think it's still under C:\Games
Explorer will show a specific icon for any symlinked folders, so you know it instantly looking in C:\Games as well.
 
Chrispy_
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Re: A little help, please.....

Mon Jun 20, 2016 12:14 pm

I use symlinks for my games folder but it's a bit messier since you have to have two locations for everything; The symlink in the original location and the duplicate in the destination location that has the actual data.

It works pretty much flawlessly and there are even GUIs for it, but the extra requirement of having to keep the folder with symlink pointers at the original location restricts what you can do with that drive. Much easier in this case to just rename drive letters I think as the source drive letter is D, meaning it's a non-OS storage drive (I think).
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tanker27
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Re: A little help, please.....

Mon Jun 20, 2016 12:31 pm

Symlink......BAH!

So I symlinked my user and downloads folders back when I had a smaller 40 GB SSD. It was such a headache to maintain that I feel it isn't worth it. Especially in this case, I want the full benefits of the stuff installed on the SSD and plus free up the space on the HDD to store other things.
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tanker27
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Re: A little help, please.....

Tue Jun 21, 2016 6:50 am

So I purchased Macrium and downloaded it last night. (used my member discount too). I was going through it and could not find where I could pick and choose which folders to back up and how to make a image of said folders. I could clone the whole drive or I could mark a folder for back up but neither is what I want to do.

Can someone walk me through the process or direct me to some knowledge base article that shows me how?
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blahsaysblah
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Re: A little help, please.....

Tue Jun 21, 2016 7:42 am

tanker27 wrote:
So I purchased Macrium and downloaded it last night. (used my member discount too). I was going through it and could not find where I could pick and choose which folders to back up and how to make a image of said folders. I could clone the whole drive or I could mark a folder for back up but neither is what I want to do.

Can someone walk me through the process or direct me to some knowledge base article that shows me how?

? Already given free answer.

Using "C:\Program Files (x86)\gamegame" as example.

Using Windows Explorer, rename gamegame to gamegame.old
Using Windows Explorer, make a directory where you want each game to be. For example, D:\games\gamegame
Using Windows Explorer copy what's >inside< gamegame.old to new gamegame directory

open a CMD prompt with administrator permissions. (Windows Key + "S", type in: cmd, right click, Run as Administrator)
cd "\program files (x86)" (note the quotes are necessary when there is a space in name, note there are two spaces)
mklink /j gamgame d:\games\gamegame
Verify:
dir gamegame*

something that includes
**date** <JUNCTION> gamegame [D:\games\gamegame]


This way, the program does not know anything has changed. As far as its concerned nothing has. No trying to find all secondary files, updating configuration files or registry entries...

edit: the game should not be running, its launcher should not be running/minimized...
edit2: so than run the game, verify it runs fine, and you can delete the gamegame.old, only time i ran into issue, it was not a game and did weird walking of directory structure.
 
Captain Ned
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Re: A little help, please.....

Tue Jun 21, 2016 7:49 am

tanker27 wrote:
So I purchased Macrium and downloaded it last night. (used my member discount too). I was going through it and could not find where I could pick and choose which folders to back up and how to make a image of said folders. I could clone the whole drive or I could mark a folder for back up but neither is what I want to do.

Can someone walk me through the process or direct me to some knowledge base article that shows me how?

Use the File & Folder Backup button in the upper left corner.
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tanker27
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Re: A little help, please.....

Tue Jun 21, 2016 7:53 am

As I have stated before I would rather not use Symlinks because they are a nightmare to maintain. I like my file structures nice and clean I would rather physically move the files and rename the SSD to the old HDD, In this case f: to D:.
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tanker27
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Re: A little help, please.....

Tue Jun 21, 2016 7:53 am

Captain Ned wrote:
Use the File & Folder Backup button in the upper left corner.


/facepalm how did I miss that......."if it was a snake.........."
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Ryu Connor
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Re: A little help, please.....

Tue Jun 21, 2016 8:09 am

Keep in mind that Windows has a built in dd and rsync now.

You could have used DISM to image the drive or robocopy to copy and even mirror the drive contents.

DISM is even a file based imaging instead of a sector based (solves the pesky size difference issue).
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blahsaysblah
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Re: A little help, please.....

Tue Jun 21, 2016 9:21 am

tanker27 wrote:
As I have stated before I would rather not use Symlinks because they are a nightmare to maintain. I like my file structures nice and clean I would rather physically move the files and rename the SSD to the old HDD, In this case f: to D:.

That's quite a different scenario.

Still, someone already mentioned that way too("new" version of xcopy from DOS days):
robocopy f:\ d:\ /COPY:DATSO /DCOPY:DAT /XD "System Volume Information" "$RECYCLE.BIN" /E /L

(remove /L to change from a dry run showing what would happen, to actually doing it)
(add any other directories you do not wish copied to XD)

DO NOT USE /MIR w/o /L /V first. That will mirror -- delete stuff on destination.

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