Acronis Migrate Easy
Migrate Easy
I have a pretty decent digital music collection and the 300GB hard drive on my desktop system wasn’t going to cut it any more. 1TB drives can be found for less than $100 on Amazon these days and so it was time for an upgrade.
Since I’m no longer surrounded by tech gurus as I was in my past life, this time it would be on me to figure out the easiest way to mirror my current drive to the new, install, etc.
Of course, like the newbie that I was with this I started out with the guys that has the best marketing and not best product – I actually believed the carefully distorted mess on the Norton Ghost box and thought it could do the job.
The short version is that after four attempts to mirror the drive only to have the new drive fail on startup each time, then checking online for workarounds, etc. I gave up. Clearly Ghost might work for backups, but despite the spin on the box, it’s not for mirroring and fails slowly and miserably if you try to use it for that purpose.
So I finally got smart and did what I should have done – I checked online for the best solution and found it – Acronis’s “Migrate Easy”.
Living in the “Cloud”
The "Cloud"
Most of us are now quite comfortable with the use of personal computers, laptops and even the new micro “netbooks” that are all the rage right now. And the use of hard drives, thumb drives, CDs and DVDs for storing files is quite familiar as well.
But “cloud computing” is a relatively new concept in data storage and deploying applications that is particularly useful to those of us who work in a traditional office, but also work from home or while on the road.
“Cloud Computing” like many new concepts often means different things to different people. But in it’s most basic form it involves applications that are not installed on your local desktop or laptop system but ones that are accessed via a web browswer. And the same for data or files used by these applications – they are stored on the servers, or in the “cloud” that is the Internet.
I’m currently using Box.net and Dropbox, two “cloud” services for online/offsite data storage and if you need something like this I would recommend both:
ScanCafe
Like many of us I had a big box full of photos from the pre-digital age. And like many I had good intentions, planning to scan them someday and, after years of putting it off, I eventually picked up a decent flatbed scanner to start the project. And I scanned about a dozen photos, importing the files, cleaning them up – and realized at the rate that I could do that I would be done sometime around the year 2050.
Needless to say, that project ended quickly, the scanner quickly put back in the garage where it still sits. But I still had a box of photos that I wanted to have join the others in my digitized collection. So I looked around online, checked out several online scanning services and sent a test batch to ScanCafe – and wished I never even thought about the scanner.
All I can say is that it works. Bundle up your photos with as much or as little organization as you would like, print out the label from their site, drop it off at with UPS – and you can track your photos as they move through the system, review them online (with a chance to review and reject any scans you don’t like – and you can delete up to 50% of your photo scans without charge), and they will soon be online and shipped back to you with on a CD or DVD.
So if you’d like to finally bring those photos from way back into the digital age forget a scanner, forget wasting countless hours trying to do something that you can’t do well and don’t want to learn – just box ‘em up and send them to ScanCafe.
What you will do with all the free time you didn’t waste is up to you…
Site: ScanCafe