Adobe Lightroom & CS 6: can I clone them to a bigger ssd

uniquelycat said:

I edit and create in both cs6 and Lightroom and currently have them installed on 120gb ssd. Keeping the drive cleaned out is a never ending job. I try installing exes to my terebyte D drive but everything seems to want to put stuff on the C drive.

I am at the fed up and frustrated point so I bought a 512 gb Samsung Evo Pro ssd which I want to use as my boot drive. Lightroom and CS 6 must always stay on the boot drive I know.

I want to know if I can clone the Adobe products from the current boot ssd drive to the new bigger drive. Decisions, decisions, decisions! I know

hope someone can help or has ideas so I don't have to do a clean install.

Click to expand...

I believe Samsung has some software that should have come with your SSD, called Magician, or something like that. Or, you can download it from Samsung. It is supposed to be able to migrate your system to a new SSD. Typically this is from a HDD, but it should work from one SSD to another. That said, moving operating systems and programs has some risk. I would make sure you have all your data backed up in case you need to do a clean install. And, a clean install is likely to give you the best long term performance.

Even a 512 GB SSD is going to fill up if you store data on it. You may want to look at using some HDD's in RAID 0 configuration , or Windows 8 Storage Spaces. That can significant speed up HDD read and write. Or, there are hybrid HDD's which have a built in SSD, which can make the drive faster.

uniquelycat said:

I edit and create in both cs6 and Lightroom and currently have them installed on 120gb ssd. Keeping the drive cleaned out is a never ending job. I try installing exes to my terebyte D drive but everything seems to want to put stuff on the C drive.

I am at the fed up and frustrated point so I bought a 512 gb Samsung Evo Pro ssd which I want to use as my boot drive. Lightroom and CS 6 must always stay on the boot drive I know.

I want to know if I can clone the Adobe products from the current boot ssd drive to the new bigger drive. Decisions, decisions, decisions! I know

hope someone can help or has ideas so I don't have to do a clean install.

Cathy

Click to expand...

Cathy why are you trying to avoid a clean install? That's one of the best things you can do for your computer.

The avoidance of a clean install is not to destroy my sons game data etc and not to void my 3 year warranty. I have just barely used this computer a year so hate to screw things up by doing the clean install. I had the computer built thru Digital Storm (the Digital Storm Hailstorm Edition) and the computer is a very big heavy beast to send back to them for upgrading the boot drive.

I just dumbly thought I could choose the path to install software so I choose a 120 GB SSD for boot up with a 1TB SATA drive for the storage part.

Now I spend amounts of time keeping everything trimmed down cuz the 120 GB is not big enough for the main drive.

Cathy

I saw many references for the Aconis (SP) software but when I went there they had multiple choices and I did not know which software I needed to choose and if I needed a cable etc too.

I want to save my Photoshop CS6 and Lightroom in the move and my son wants to save his games on Steam, Uplay etc with his stats and stuff etc. There is little other stuff that is important and not able to be loaded I think.

That is where the dilemma is and also not voiding my 3 year warranty with the company, Digital Storm, that I had build this computer just a year ago. This is a custom made computer so it is big and probably not easily returned to the company for an upgraded boot SSD.

Cathy

uniquelycat said:

I edit and create in both cs6 and Lightroom and currently have them installed on 120gb ssd. Keeping the drive cleaned out is a never ending job. I try installing exes to my terebyte D drive but everything seems to want to put stuff on the C drive.

I am at the fed up and frustrated point so I bought a 512 gb Samsung Evo Pro ssd which I want to use as my boot drive. Lightroom and CS 6 must always stay on the boot drive I know.

I want to know if I can clone the Adobe products from the current boot ssd drive to the new bigger drive. Decisions, decisions, decisions! I know

hope someone can help or has ideas so I don't have to do a clean install.

Cathy

Click to expand...

Most HDD manufacturers have a free version of migrate software for their brand of HDD's Have a look at the Samsung website and see if they got it available. I know Intel and WD have free migration software available.

here you go, download link from samsung for the free data migration tool. No need to buy acronis true image.

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/samsungssd/downloads.html

Ron AKA said:

uniquelycat said:

I edit and create in both cs6 and Lightroom and currently have them installed on 120gb ssd. Keeping the drive cleaned out is a never ending job. I try installing exes to my terebyte D drive but everything seems to want to put stuff on the C drive.

I am at the fed up and frustrated point so I bought a 512 gb Samsung Evo Pro ssd which I want to use as my boot drive. Lightroom and CS 6 must always stay on the boot drive I know.

I want to know if I can clone the Adobe products from the current boot ssd drive to the new bigger drive. Decisions, decisions, decisions! I know

hope someone can help or has ideas so I don't have to do a clean install.

Click to expand...

I believe Samsung has some software that should have come with your SSD, called Magician, or something like that. Or, you can download it from Samsung. It is supposed to be able to migrate your system to a new SSD. Typically this is from a HDD, but it should work from one SSD to another. That said, moving operating systems and programs has some risk. I would make sure you have all your data backed up in case you need to do a clean install. And, a clean install is likely to give you the best long term performance.

Even a 512 GB SSD is going to fill up if you store data on it. You may want to look at using some HDD's in RAID 0 configuration , or Windows 8 Storage Spaces. That can significant speed up HDD read and write. Or, there are hybrid HDD's which have a built in SSD, which can make the drive faster.

Click to expand...

Magician is the software that makes the SSD faster (it's a driver and management tool). The Migration tool is the tool to transfer your complete install(image) to a new drive.

uniquelycat said:

I edit and create in both cs6 and Lightroom and currently have them installed on 120gb ssd. Keeping the drive cleaned out is a never ending job. I try installing exes to my terebyte D drive but everything seems to want to put stuff on the C drive.

I am at the fed up and frustrated point so I bought a 512 gb Samsung Evo Pro ssd which I want to use as my boot drive. Lightroom and CS 6 must always stay on the boot drive I know.

I want to know if I can clone the Adobe products from the current boot ssd drive to the new bigger drive. Decisions, decisions, decisions! I know

hope someone can help or has ideas so I don't have to do a clean install.

Cathy

Click to expand...

Just Deactivate your current install and then reactivate it once you have cloned the drive.

catasmith said:

The avoidance of a clean install is not to destroy my sons game data etc and not to void my 3 year warranty. I have just barely used this computer a year so hate to screw things up by doing the clean install. I had the computer built thru Digital Storm (the Digital Storm Hailstorm Edition) and the computer is a very big heavy beast to send back to them for upgrading the boot drive.

I just dumbly thought I could choose the path to install software so I choose a 120 GB SSD for boot up with a 1TB SATA drive for the storage part.

Now I spend amounts of time keeping everything trimmed down cuz the 120 GB is not big enough for the main drive.

Cathy

Click to expand...

Sorry to say so, but you are wrong. 120GB is more then sufficient for a system drive. But the decision to upgrade to a larger SSD is not wrong either.

There are a few thing that you should be aware off. Depending on the OS, the installed RAM and the way you use your computer, there could be a need for a lot of space on the system disk. If you have 32GB RAM and you use hibernate then you can already expect that the size of paging file and the hibernate file can use half of your available space.

The rest of the hard disk will be used by the operating system, unfortunately Windows over the last few years has become very space hungry. This can take up another 25% of your storage.

The remainder is used by you through the applications you have installed. This is not the executable portion but more space used when you use the applications.

This is where your real problem can be found. I will only address Lightroom.

LR uses space for caching, after installation it will be on the C drive. In Lightroom you can change this in the preferences (Edit/Preferences/File Handling for the Camera Raw Cache and the Video Cache. On my system I have 20GB for Camera Raw on my C drive which has a size 100GB currently 81GB used, no real problem here.

But you also have your Lightroom catatalog and preview directory. This is most likely where your problem can be found. The preview directory is always created in the same directory as your catalog. If your catalog is stored under "My Pictures" and is named "my catalog" then there will be a directory named "my catalog.lrdata". This directory can be very large depending on how you have setup the catalog settings (Edit/Catalog Settings.../File Handling). On my installation the catalog is on the D drive and has a size of 460MB with a preview directory size of 80GB.

Now I have to warn you about something that Adobe does not really explain fully and that is the catalog restore. Catalog backup only creates a copy of the current catalog file in another directory, it does not backup the previews and it does not backup your photos. Previews do not need a backup but you must ensure that you have backup in case you loose your hard disk. The real problem is with catalog restore because most of the time I see comments that you can select a backup catalog in the windows explorer with a double click and Lightroom will open this file as the catalog. Please never ever do so. The reason is very simple, it is a backup catalog in a backup directory, when you open a backup catalog then lightroom will create a new preview directory in the backup directory. This is wrong for two reasons, a) you do not want to work in a catalog backup directory and b) you have orphaned your original catalog with previews wasting lots of space.

If you ever need to restore a catalog use the following procedure:
- rename the original catalog file to <originalename>_old.lrcat
- rename the preview directory to <originalname>_old Previews.lrdata
- copy the backup catalog from the backup directory to your catalog directory

Then start Lightroom check that you have the right backup restored, previews will be recreated as needed. Once you are satisfied that all is Ok delete the old catalog and old preview directory.

Going back to your orginal question, with the right software you can clone your old SSD to a new SSD. Depending on the software you may be able to enlarge the partition size during the clone operation. When you are able to clone the disk signature then it will not affect the OS activation. I have used Acronis True Image Home for this in the past.

Please note that I wrote this reply not just for you as there may be other persons in the same situation.

The following is not addressed to you, it can be dangerous in the wrong hands.

If you ever have the situation that disk space runs out on a drive with sufficient disk space on another drive then you may be able to relocate some directories to another drive with the junction command. This command is availbe from www.sysinternals.com (now Microsoft). Let us assume you have directory named "Photo" on your C drive with a subdirectory named "catalog" and a catalog file named "lightroom.lrcat". Then there will be a preview directory "lightroom Previews.lrdata". To relocate the preview directory to another disk (D) you can do the following:
- create a new directory "d:\Photo\Catalog\lightroom Previews.lrdata"
- optionally copy previews using robocopy or xcopy
- execute from a command window as administrator: the command 'junction "C:\Photo\Catalog\lightroom Previews.lrcat" "D:\Photo\Catalog\lightroom Previews.lrcat"

The result will be that Lightroom thinks it is using the preview directory on C but really uses the directory on D.

Warning: using junction on directories shown in the Windows Explorer under "libraries" is not a good idea because those are junctions already. Also do not relocate any directory used by the OS.

catasmith said:

I saw many references for the Aconis (SP) software but when I went there they had multiple choices and I did not know which software I needed to choose and if I needed a cable etc too.

Click to expand...

You can indeed clone your complete 120GB drive to the new Evo; cloning whole drives is my standard backup method. As has been mentioned before, Samsung SSDs work with migration software (I think it's a version of Ghost) you should be able to get from Samsung's web site if a disk isn't included with your new SSD.

I haven't used that software, so I have no info about it.

I don't use CS6 and my LR install is recent, but I've never had to reinstall anything after a true drive cloning; as far as I can tell, the target drive is exactly the same as the source drive as far as the software is concerned.

There should be a place to install the new SSD near your old one, and Digital Storm should have included extra power connectors and data cables to connect your computer and new SSD. If not, they're cheap from Amazon or Newegg.

catasmith said:

I want to save my Photoshop CS6 and Lightroom in the move and my son wants to save his games on Steam, Uplay etc with his stats and stuff etc. There is little other stuff that is important and not able to be loaded I think.

That is where the dilemma is and also not voiding my 3 year warranty with the company, Digital Storm, that I had build this computer just a year ago. This is a custom made computer so it is big and probably not easily returned to the company for an upgraded boot SSD.

Cathy

Click to expand...

Digital Storm makes some fancy PCs indeed. I understand your not wanting to ship it--my PC is a large, heavy tower too.

C drives fill up because as people install software they download the installation files to C, usually in a directory called Downloads of My Downloads. Once the software is installed - files are extracted from the installation set and installed in the proper locations on the C drive - and the original downloaded installation files are no longer required on C.

Big, quick space savings can be had by moving all your installation files from wherever they are on your C drive to a Downloads folder (or whatever you want to call it) on your data drive.

uniquelycat said:

I edit and create in both cs6 and Lightroom and currently have them installed on 120gb ssd. Keeping the drive cleaned out is a never ending job. I try installing exes to my terebyte D drive but everything seems to want to put stuff on the C drive.

I am at the fed up and frustrated point so I bought a 512 gb Samsung Evo Pro ssd which I want to use as my boot drive. Lightroom and CS 6 must always stay on the boot drive I know.

Click to expand...

From what I remember that is an internal SSD that requires you to open your PC and connect the SATA and power connectors. If you do so I am guessing your warranty will be void. There are kits if your PC has an eSata connector to connect the drive externally, (an eSata cable and a power source) but you would also have to check if your PC's BIOS supports booting from a drive on the eSata connector. If not, I am not sure what you are going to do with the drive you bought.

Acronis works by migrating everything from the original small drive to the new larger drive. Once the migration is complete, you disconnect the original drive and boot off the new one.

uniquelycat said:

I want to know if I can clone the Adobe products from the current boot ssd drive to the new bigger drive. Decisions, decisions, decisions! I know

hope someone can help or has ideas so I don't have to do a clean install.

Cathy

Click to expand...

edispics said:

From what I remember that is an internal SSD that requires you to open your PC and connect the SATA and power connectors. If you do so I am guessing your warranty will be void. There are kits if your PC has an eSata connector to connect the drive externally, (an eSata cable and a power source) but you would also have to check if your PC's BIOS supports booting from a drive on the eSata connector. If not, I am not sure what you are going to do with the drive you bought.

Acronis works by migrating everything from the original small drive to the new larger drive. Once the migration is complete, you disconnect the original drive and boot off the new one.

Click to expand...

Digital Storm isn't your ordinary crank-out-the-boxes mass PC seller. Many of their customers are going to want to make changes themselves.

I was curious about this, so I looked on their warranty page:


"C: UPGRADES

Digital Storm gives the customer the freedom to upgrade his or her computer system. If you would like Digital Storm to upgrade your system for you, you will be responsible for shipping costs back and forth and a small labor fee. However, if the customer begins to experience issues after the upgrade the customer must remove the suspected hardware in order to obtain warranty service and support."

So as long as uniquelycat doesn't break anything (and these big towers are generally designed for easy access) she'll be fine with the warranty.

And Cathy, if you have any questions about upgrading your Hailstorm, I wouldn't hesitate to call DS. Machines like this should come with high-grade tech support; you don't hand a PC like this over to the neighborhood kids to fix. :-D

Yes down load a free copy of macrim reflect 32 or 64 bit version - Macrin , you my have to run in macrim _ I do'nt remebr the part , if widowns will not startup after the clone - I think it's called repair windows boot drive.



I have cloned mechanical and ssd's without a problen and not having to reinstall the software and go thru all the nonses that goes along with reinstalling software.