Rebuilds are a total PITA!! I had to do one last year--even with all my backups, I lost a lot of my older programs. And it took forever to get my 12-y/o printer to work with the new OS.

Over the past week. 9 years was a damn good run for one install, it started out W7 then I did the free upgrade ... it was probably 'time', ya know?

Also, I'm very much in the habit of keeping my C: drive relatively free of 'stuff I REALLY care about' ... got 3 other spinners in this box for my more permanent storage. Gonna start backing up one to the other though.

Anyways, the image/restore went swimmingly (Macrium Reflect is kick ass), I'm now talking to ya from my 1-week old install ... that's now living on the new SSD.

MUCH BETTER, way snappier, so noticeable

I set up partitions on my new hard drive. C: is OS only; D: is other installed programs; all DATA (photos, letters, spreadsheets etc.) files go on a separate drive, with weekly backups to my SSD. I only back up C and D when I make changes to them. I had a serious data loss several years ago, and I learned from it.

You wont have to redownload everything but it'll go through that initial setup bit again.

how good it was about being able to run games that've never actually been installed but just exist in your steam folder from a past install. Was very much hoping they'll fire up after brief install of stuff like C++ and Direct X runtimes.

I do believe you can (FINALLY) actually have >1 Steam folder now (on multiple drives) so you can put older games on your spinner and cycle in newer ones onto a boot ssd ... then I'm really hoping you can move them off to the spinner easily as they get old and you play 'em less or rarely. LIke, I hope that's built in to steam you don't have to futz with moving files yourself ... Again, guess I'll soon find out.

It's 2TB, so it takes a whole night, but the peace of mind is worth it. I then store the boot drive in the safe. AOMEI partition assistant is free and works great.

That's also how I upgraded to a SSD this past weekend, a simple clone, put in the new drive and you're done.

The first thing I noticed was the quiet. I hadn't realized how much noise the old Seagate hard drive made. I'd attributed a lot of that noise to the fans. I hope this ssd lasts longer than four years! It's nice how fast the ssd boots.

Backing up my machines is easy because I use Linux and I'm not a gamer. I don't have to muck about with proprietary software whenever I build a new machine or upgrade an old one. I keep multiple backups of my home directory, a couple hundred gigabytes, mostly family photographs and old home movies. I maintain the backups using grsync.

Linux systems installed on a USB stick are surprisingly transportable, and will boot all my amd64 machines to my preferred MATE desktop.

My laptop can be booted to Windows 10 but I don't use any Microsoft products unless someone is paying me. In Windows I mostly use Portable Apps. Those are easily transportable from one computer to another. Most will run on Linux as well, using Wine.

I'm possibly too obsessive about backups. I have files going back to the later 'seventies and emulators, as necessary, for most of the machines I've used since. I can still write Atari 800 programs and play Atari games like it's 1982. (Yeah, that's proprietary Atari software, but I still have all my Atari hardware, cartridges, and disks in a box in my garage.)

Good luck with your new SSD!