Okay, so it's that time of the year (or rather decade) again and I have to reinstall Windows. The thing is that my HDD is quite obviously dying (frequent clicking noises, system hiccups, many programs have trouble operating normally). So today I finally bought an SSD that I wish to reinstall Windows 10 on.

Now, I'd love some advice on how to sensibly approach the matter of backups. I'm a simple man, I just used to manually copy the most important data to another drive but I guess there's a better way®.

The other (and most important) thing is: since I'm installing the system on a new drive I'm not deleting any of the old data and should be able to just copy the data I want after the installation from there. HOWEVER, I've had a nasty surprise in the past where Windows 7 wouldn't just allow me to copy data from the system or user folders of another Windows 7 installation - I would get some sort of popup that tells me that I can't do that. Do I have to expect any such barriers or can I safely assume that all data can be rather easily recovered from the old drive later on, at least using some tools?

Thanks in advance.

Bro, you're a god among imbeciles. I had checked out some free software for migrating but it was all crap (at least the free stuff) and so I decided to just go for a fresh installation. Only now I actually checked out the Samsung website (the drive is a Samsung 850 EVO) and found some migration software on there. Checking it out right away.

Also, only now I noticed that there's a CD in the box (I had not unpacked the thing yet), will also have to check what's on there. That certainly explains why the box was roughly CD size even though the drive is tiny, lol.

Edit: Yep, there's actually migration software on that disc. Thank you.

Just hope my old drive is going to survive this procedure. It's pretty late here now, will do it tomorrow. Anyway, great thanks. Really had not thought that the manufacturer might provide this kind of software.

Awesome! Good luck. That's one of the drives I bought and their migration software worked flawlessly for me.

Just wanted to report in (in case you're interested or others are considering migrating to an SSD): I did a clean up before starting the migration process which brought the amount of data to be transferred down from 1.5 TB to 900 GB. I used the Samsung migration software, which turned out to be ridiculously easy to use, and the migration process took roughly three or three and a half hours to complete. After everything was done the PC would boot up normally, it didn't really seem to care about that transplant and I wouldn't even have noticed the change if things didn't suddenly work lightning fast. Awesome, would have never believed that the migration could be this simple, especially going by the stuff I had read on other forums including multiple posts by self-proclaimed hardware experts who claimed that migration is not a good idea and one should always do a fresh install. Suckers!

By far the biggest hassle was swapping the drives, two screws holding the old drive in the case are basically out of reach (apparently I would have to remove the entire main board to get there) so I just left it in there, just disconnected. There's also no slot for 2.5" drives in there (nor do I have one of them 3.5"brackets for 2.5" devices) so during the transfer I just had the SSD hang awkwardly on the wires (which didn't worry me much thanks to the drive's small weight and lack of mechanical parts) and now I've just put it on top of the old drive. That should do until I get a new case for my PC.

Anyway, thanks again for the hint with the migration software provided by the drive's manufacturer and confirmation that migration worked perfectly for you. There's a actually chance I would have gone for a fresh install otherwise. This saved me a lot of time and nerves.

That's great. :)

Pretty much the same experience I had (although mine was much quicker, as I was cloning from a smaller SSD and only had about 60 GB to transfer).

As for the SSD itself, when I ran out of adapter brackets, I just duct taped it into the 3.5" drive bay.