How to Move Your Data and Programs to a New Hard Drive

This article explains three ways to replace your hard drive and move your data and programs to the new one. It includes information on selecting the right replacement hard drive.

Mirror the Old Drive Using an External Drive

Replacing the hard drive on your laptop or desktop computer is one of the best upgrades you can make; in particular, it prolongs the useful life of an aging laptop. Upgrading to a larger drive gives you much-needed additional storage space, and you also can gain a big productivity boost from faster hard drive speeds.

If you have an external hard drive lying around or network-attached storage (NAS) device, you don't need to buy anything besides the new hard drive. Using commercial backup software like Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office, or a free backup app like Clonezilla Live, you can save an image of your current drive onto an external drive.

The software can make a mirror image backup of the drive, which means it makes a full copy of everything: Windows and all your data, applications, and settings. Then, you can physically swap out the old drive in your computer with the new drive, run the cloning software again on the new drive, and install the cloned image you saved with the backup program.

Copy Directly From the Old Drive to the New Drive

If you don't want to use an intermediate external hard drive or NAS to copy the data back and forth, you can just connect the new and old drives together using either a simple USB-to-SATA/IDE adapter or cable, a laptop hard drive enclosure (which holds the old hard drive and connects it to your laptop via USB), or a laptop hard drive upgrade kit.

The latter typically includes not just the enclosure and cable, but also software for cloning the old drive to the new one. 

In this case, you have two options: clone the old drive or just copy your files manually.

Cloning the Old Drive

1. Connect the new drive to the laptop.

2. Use the cloning software to clone the old drive onto the new one.

3. Swap out the old drive with the new drive.

Copying Just the Data

1. Install the new drive into the laptop.

2. Install Windows to the new drive. You can take this time to also install all the apps you want, but it's not necessary right now.

3. Connect the old drive to the laptop using its cable or enclosure, and back up your data to the new drive. This is as easy as copying whatever you want to keep, which might include your Desktop items and the contents of the Pictures, Videos, Music, and Downloads folder.

Which Is the Recommended Method?

The preferred method is to swap out the new and old drives, then connect the old drive to the laptop via a USB cable. Then, just copy the folders under your Users folder to the new drive.

It takes more time to install the operating system and programs again, but you wind up with a brand new system. Software like Ninite make reinstalling applications very easy when setting up your new laptop.

Choose the Right Replacement Drive

Not all hard drives are the same. If you have an older laptop, for example, the connector for the drive might not work with newer hard drives. Similarly, make sure the drive you buy will fit properly into your laptop or desktop PC bay.

To find out the specifics on what kind of drive you should buy, do a web search for your current drive manufacturer and model to get the size, thickness, and interface (e.g., 2.5-inch, 12.5mm thick SATA drive). Most laptops use 2.5-inch drives, but do check yours to make sure; you'll find the info on the drive label itself.

You should also consider if you want your new drive to have more storage than your existing one. This would be a great time to increase storage on your laptop by simply installing a hard drive with more space.

Once you've purchased the right replacement drive, physically swapping your old drive with the new one is very easy — it's just a matter of removing a few screws and sliding in the new drive in place of the old one.