Mr No Name Posted September 21 Share Posted September 21 As the title says, I have a C drive, which is 500gb, and has about 60gb left free, it contains mostly vsts and programs, and obviously the operating system, any good ideas to migrate some stuff to another drive, I had heard it can cause problems, Could I migrate the whole drive "MINUS THE OPERATING SYSTEM" to a bigger one without having to reinstall any plug ins, and just leave the operating system on the C drive ? Thanks in advance Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mettelus Posted September 21 Share Posted September 21 Before tackling that, get something like TreeSize Free and see what is taking up space on your C drive. Use that as your guide as you go. For things like Cakewalk Projects, that folder can be moved to another drive and the path to that is exposed in Cakewalk preferences. A lot of space is consumed by audio/video data files if they are on C. Temp files in C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Temp and C:\Windows\Temp can be safely deleted... if they are in use, they cannot, so skip those. The C:\Users\[username]\Downloads folder can be moved/deleted at your discretion. I typically use directory junctions for things over 4GB, but before you jump into that, come up with a strategy for how you want to move things to make sense to you. I would start with TreeSize Free and get a feel for what are the biggest problems first. The junction process can be slow, so you will not be able to do it in one sitting, but you can make junctions to the heavy hitters first and free up space and get the low-hanging fruit. Some things cannot be moved, or do not take kindly to junctions (Melodyne being one... so you cannot move/junction your VST3 folder), but a lot of HUGE program folders and data sets can, so junctions make the C drive "look" like it did, but the junctions are folder pointers to another drive. The advantage to them is you can leave installs to "default locations" and most programs don't care (but a few do, like Corel and Adobe). 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Canopus Posted September 21 Share Posted September 21 I agree, start by using TreeSize Free to find out which folders are large enough to bother moving. Also, another thing to watch out for when preparing to use directory junctions, is when you’ve got sample libraries from Steinberg, such as those coming with Cubase, HALion, or Groove Agent. Such sample libraries are stored in files with the extension *.vstsound, which by default are stored somewhere under the folder C:\ProgramData\Steinberg. Use Steinberg Library Manager to move such files around instead of using junctions. For some reason, Steinberg's apps don't seem to acknowledge symbolic links in Windows. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr No Name Posted September 21 Author Share Posted September 21 cheers for the info folks 👍 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bass Guitar Posted September 22 Share Posted September 22 Last year I upgraded a 250 GB SSD C drive to a 500 GB SSD using the Samsung Magician free app. Took about 30 minutes. Worked perfectly and no re-installing anything. Just clone and swap. Keep the old drive as a safety back up. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr No Name Posted September 22 Author Share Posted September 22 3 hours ago, Bass Guitar said: Last year I upgraded a 250 GB SSD C drive to a 500 GB SSD using the Samsung Magician free app. Took about 30 minutes. Worked perfectly and no re-installing anything. Just clone and swap. Keep the old drive as a safety back up. Really? Wow, sounds good, did that include the operating system? win 10 in my case ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr No Name Posted September 22 Author Share Posted September 22 I'm guessing you need to use samsung drives ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mettelus Posted September 22 Share Posted September 22 The Macrium Reflect free app (which was retired on 1/1/24, but the free trial should work fine) will restore a disk image to a larger drive, but you need to resize partitions to achieve it. Below is a video that details the process without being too long. I upgraded from a 250GB to a 500GB C drive a few years ago with this method, and another thing to watch out for is the first ("Recovery") partition defaults to 500MB... that was always around 490MB for me and causing issues, so I upped that to 1GB on the new drive (in addition to expanding the Primary partition to use the full drive as in the video). I have 808 applications installed and only use roughly half my C drive which images to roughly 120GB (I have a LOT of junctions... another advantage is images are faster to store/recover... other drives are simply straightup xcopy/robocopy to an external drive for new/altered files). 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bass Guitar Posted September 24 Share Posted September 24 On 9/21/2024 at 11:33 PM, Mr No Name said: Really? Wow, sounds good, did that include the operating system? win 10 in my case ? Yes. And yes they were Samsung drives but I also had a different brand involved and it cloned it as well. Used it at least 5 times now over the last few years to clone C drives. Never a problem. It's free. You have nothing to lose by giving it a try. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Starship Krupa Posted October 7 Share Posted October 7 I recently moved a 500GB C drive to a 1TB drive using Clonezilla, a favorite of Mark MacLeod. With Clonezilla, you make a bootable disk (CD or USB stick), boot from it, and then follow the prompts to clone the disk. Then once you have the system booting from the new drive, you can use the Windows Disk Manager to extend the partition size to take up the unused space on the new, larger drive. E-Z P-Z. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wayne Smith Posted Saturday at 08:37 AM Share Posted Saturday at 08:37 AM Only went through the thread kind of quick.. But no-one mention (question) just having one drive? Can't imagen not running two -or three? For back-up and safety first off 😳 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr No Name Posted Saturday at 10:28 AM Author Share Posted Saturday at 10:28 AM 1 hour ago, Wayne Smith said: Only went through the thread kind of quick.. But no-one mention (question) just having one drive? Can't imagen not running two -or three? For back-up and safety first off 😳 I have 3 drives on my laptop here, a 2 tb and two 500 gb ones, my OS is on a 500 gb, as well as vsts, daws and programs, samples and downloads are on the 2 tb one. I had read it was problematic not having your programs and vsts on same drive as the OS, I have since found out this is false information. I deleted a few programs/programdata off the C drive and won back 70 gb, now have 120 gb free of 500, aim to keep 100 free for smooth operation of the computer. Treesize program was useful for showing what was taking up space. have so far deleted. ableton - live "lite" 8.5gb Air music tech - Structure 38gb ujam- god knows what 7.5 gb Traktion - waveform and other stuff I didn't download 12gb will cull some more at some point. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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