how the &$%! do i migrate computers???

[chk071]

IMO, the most important point in migrating your stuff to a new computer is tidiness, and a good idea of what is happening on your computer. And a good and senseful backup. When it comes to audio plugins, it's also important to know which plugin uses what copy protection, and whether you have to deactivate licenses etc. When you consider all those points, it's easy peasy, IMO. I've done it a dozen times. It is work, but, it never was more than a day's work for me. Admittedly a 8 hours day...

The installation of the software is the most work IME.

[codec_spurt]

Honestly the above is a bit overkill, why not just upgrade to the latest Windows 10 and use what works.

[codec_spurt]

Well, on a basic level if you have a situation that's so hard to copy over to a similar enough system, you've experienced what they call mission creep in a big way, and like Anthony said above it's a good time to reassess what out of hundreds of plugins you actually are using. I don't know what authorization has to happen with those many things, I have things which were rather automatic, eg., Native Access and FXpansion's manager (and a dongle ). I've cloned my whole drive before to have two similar but not identical boot drives without all that shite and I didn't have to throw money at it, for that matter.

To be fair this seems definitely more of a problem with a Windows system for every reason. What I did was not ideal, either, I'm an idiot. "it took a month", JFC. It took me an afternoon and now I know of an easier path to the same.


Long term, yeah, a disk image? Surely no.

Again, I repeat:

There are two problem domains here.

1: Hardware.
2: Software.

You have outlined problem domain no. 2 exquisitely well.

To reiterate: The hardware is the easy stuff, the real shit happens with software and you are just going to have to bite that bullet baby.

Software managers may or may not hinder this process. For me, NI have been a god damned nightmare. But FXpansion has been an absolute dream and a boon, even though I was totally against the concept of this to start with. I got a boat load of FX stuff, so it really helps to save time. Better than that, it actually works. NI, doesn't.

Each man's experience will be his own with this I guess. Just like life.

Restoring and recovering to dissimilar hardware is small potatoes to the nightmare that is software registration.

[codec_spurt]

....

The installation of the software is the most work IME.

This.

[jancivil]

I migrated the entire system back around September. The NI stuff all had to be reactivated but Native Access simply worked. I had forgotten that two of the SonicCouture libraries were activate using a different email and I had to have them remind me of the fact but that was the only problem.
I have tons of BFD libraries and their Auth Manager made all of that smooth. You know what would have been far easier is if everybody used a physical key.

"NI, doesn't." You say that like it's a Universal Truth. I had no problems. The only problem I have experienced with Native Access (ever) is it forced me to go through some changes installing Kontakt Factory Library, I did not have room for it and there is no option but the system drive so I had to move all of it to the external drive. I did that in preparation for the move. That annoyed the crap out of me, but I've never had it not work. It annoyed me like that because I want maybe 10% of it taking up space.


I simply made a Time Machine backup and plugged that into the new machine and did the Restore function onto the new drive. There is a better way, Migration Assistant but it took part of a day and the next day I was working.

I didn't have anything with drivers, it's all automatically recognized by the OS. Since then I acquired one thing which does have a driver installation, Korg product which is way behind the times.

This Windows business, The installation of the software is the most work IME.
/
This.

What? Why would you have to do that?
y'all can have that shit. I feel bad for you. I like things simple. It's not like I'm the sharpest knife in the drawer. Keep it simple ___

[jancivil]

Back when I was really trying to avoid certain updates and compatibility with NI and OSX, I cloned my boot drive before updating it. I had two similar systems but I was able to keep stuff working that was being obsoleted and the new stuff.
I don't get why anyone would actually manually install things which are already installed, in this day and age.

You're kind of a masochist tho, aincha

[codec_spurt]

NI Access is pretty good I must admit. I got a bit confused there, talking about the old Service Center. You are right JC it works pretty well.

I haven't even done this yet, I'm only looking at solutions.

Some old systems I have in XP are going to have be rebuilt at a very slow rate. It would take months. I used energyXT a lot and the file structure for that is brutal. You would have to hack in to every single .xt file and then rebuild from there. Every. single. file.

Mmmm...

It's gone. It's not coming back. It's a nice pipe dream to think we can re-constitute our old hardware/software. But it won't ever happen. Chuck in a bit of bit rot.

The stuff I posted is for people that are up to date. I'm not. Maybe they can migrate. It's early days with all this stuff. Most people haven't even messed with virtualization yet (because it doesn't work without drivers).

I've already lost the best work I ever did.

Things are getting better though. Migrating a 20th Century System to 21st Century winX - good luck with that homie!

Everything else is just an exercise in futility.

Still, everyone needs a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

[jancivil]

I lost everything a couple years back, I reinstalled everything twice in 2017. It's good to let go of things. I would be wasting time reworking, who knows how many things if I had the project files with the MIDI and the older templates.

[jancivil]

This may be me being stupid (or not knowing from Windows compatibility like it would balk), but I don't know why you can't just clone your drive onto a fresh drive and copy everything over with that drive as a waystation. And now you can use that intermediate drive as a backup drive. I suppose if there are version things which require an update, but that's an update. Installing everything, I would want to go jump out a window.

[Russell Grand]

Replies very much appreciated here.

It took me months to migrate (old machine --> new machine) because on purpose I decided to relax on it. My particular "fear" of forgetting to de-register a software and thus run into trouble was my main driver here.

Started with the DAWs and the plugins I always use and then added more and more plugins when I wanted them in a project or tried to load an existing one which then asked for missing plugins ABCD...

As soon as those plugins were on the new machine I've deinstalled and also de-registered them on the old one if the latter was necessary. That way I always had an overview what still had to be moved (by just looking into my VST folder and program directory) and - like djanthonyw said - profited from a clean install.

It was also helpful to think twice about folder structures for plugin data (mostly samples) and temp folders. The new machine is, compared to the old one, now perfectly organized and the garbage left over from years of demoing obscure plugins didn't survive.

To make it short: Take your time. You won't regret it.

Excellent advice.

[kevvvvv]

Yeah

I think elassi is prob right too

There's no shortcut but, hey, see it as an opportunity to get all my samples, banks et al in the right place.

Fresh organisation is appealing.

And taking time.

The replies here have been quality.

thanks = kev

[Kaine]

It's one thing migrating an OS to a similar OS on dissimilar hardware, another whole bag of fish to want to migrate to a dissimilar OS on top. Might be wrong about that as well, but I defer to your greater experience Kaine - I think that was the point you were making?

It sounded like OP wanted to migrate their current software from within Win7/8 to a clean w10.

All 3 OS builds have much the same structure under the hood and the laplink software I posted earlier will lift the software and the relevent registry entries and migrate them in one shot (well, mostly), so it should be fairly clean, although I'd certainly recomended running updating older software wherever possible to ensure it's fully compatible with the newer OS version. So, to that end, I'd recommend a clean install altogether, but then I admit on my next upgrade I'll probably be running a tool to do it too... because, I'm lazy.

Your take a clone and run it within VM method will give them full access to older projects and sure, short term to ensure compatibility with older projects I'd maybe even recommend doing so if you have the ability to do so, just to minimize downtime.

However, you've got a layer of abstraction with running an OS within an OS and the resource requirements that you'd expect when running multiple copies of various OS's. Just strikes me that if you'd gone out and spent a packet on a new setup, it's maybe not ideal to be giving away a percentage of that performance overhead when you probably don't really need to do so.

The idea being that as long as you have all of your system files, it will fill in the gaps of any requisite drivers to get you up and running.

That applies for any Windows since W7 though, it's just got better over versions.

I'm only thinking about migrating from win7 to win7 or winXP to WinXP - I wouldn't in my wildest dreams even attempt to migrate to another OS.

XP was still a nightmare, so if you've had bad experiences there, I don't blame you for being hesitant. Window builds since W7 have been far more portable. I managed to run the same OS build across about 40 different test benches on W7 without doing more than wait for a driver or two to update each time. It's only gotten better in the revisions since.

[Kaine]

Double post

[Shabdahbriah]

no - not migrate os
migrate to new better machine

this:

If you're going from 10 to 10 you just have to move the drive to your new computer, or clone it to the drive that will be in your new computer.

WIndows will boot ok and you'll just have to update drivers and reactivate Windows and any software that needs it due to the hardware change.

Will your new machine have Win-10 pre-installed?
If so, will you want to use whatever HDD/SSD it comes with, and go through loading/registering all of your stuff, or would you be willing to just remove/disconnect that disk, and set it aside to test the following alternatives?

Download the latest drivers for your motherboard/graphics card/sound card-interface etc., on to a USB stick.

Get an HDD or SSD the same size or larger than the one you currently have as your main OS HDD.

If you get a Seagate 7200 RPM drive ($50-$70), you can make an exact 'clone' of your current drive using Seagates (free) 'disk-wizard' (rebranded; Acronis true image) as a new 'boot-disk'. This takes about 10-15 minutes (in my experience).

When completed, you'll be prompted to shut down the machine, to disconnect the old drive. Shut down, and disconnect the newly cloned drive, instead. Install it in your new machine. Load drivers. Done.

Or a new Samsung SSD the same size or bigger than the one in your current machine, and use the Samsung Migration software (free), to do exactly the same thing. Shut down. Transfer drive. Load drivers. Done.

Re-register/authorize only the things that require it. Most likely you have a lot of software that can be registered/used on more than one machine. win/win.

[2c]