I've been backing up my Windows 7 system using Macrium Reflect Professional Edition v. 5.3 to external drives. I'm considering buying a new Linux system. Since there is no Macrium Reflect version for Linux, is it safe to assume that the only way I can move the files from my Win7 PC to a new Linux machine is by actually copying the files in their native formats to an external drive first, and then either copying or moving them to the new hard drive on the Linux machine?

The external drives are USB portable drives, if that makes any difference.

That's one way. You can also do something like using clonezilla or similar software to clone the windows data partition to a windows filesystem data partition on the new machine. You can also transfer on your LAN using methods described at the link below.

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/transf...windows-linux/

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good. Hope it is a habit.


Formatting, or reformatting, a drive wipes whatever information is stored on the drive.

The only safe way of keeping the data is by having a copy of the data on a different drive.

Once the drive is formatted, and the distro installed, you can use the copy (cp) command to place the data on the newly formatted drive.

If you want to know more about the copy command type

It makes a slight, but important, difference.

Having your data on an external, disconnected, drive makes it virtually impossible to format the wrong drive accidentially.

Go find a linux live mode download - standard Mint is fine. Use rufus to burn it to a USB. When you boot that, you will have a fully functional Linux system that runs entirely in RAM - doesn't install/update your system at all. See if its disk manager can open the backups and list the files. If yes, you should be fine, if not we'll need some more info - we can supply commands later in need.

I'm thinking of buying a new computer that will run only Linux -- not planning to do a dual boot on my Win7 PC, nor will I be reformatting a drive.

What I'm wanting to do is get all the photos, videos, documents, etc. off the Win7 PC and put them onto the new Linux PC. I'll continue making backups to an external drive
once I have everything on the new Linux drive. I'll be doubling the size of the drive on the new Linux PC. (The Win7 PC is about out of drive space and I've already had to move files to an external drive.)

Question: Is there a backup program that runs on both Windows and Linux that would be able to restore a Windows backup onto the new Linux computer? If that exists, it would make it less likely for user error to enter into the picture.

Copying the files in their "native format" might be the easiest way to transfer everything. Does Macrium Reflect backup files and folders create an image file or just copy files to the backup destination?

On an only linux PC I would only use native linux filesystems on the internal drive and keep the external drive as is for copying files between the two systems. So, I do not recommend cloning or other bare metal backup methods. As posted you can easily transfer files over your network or copy the files from the external disk to your home directory. Any backup method common to both operating systems would have to use relative paths since the directory tree structures are not the same.

That's what we're trying to determine.
Read my previous post again. Running in live mode doesn't do anything to your current PC - but does allow us to look around from a Linux context. Getting your data onto the new machine might be easy, migh not. At the moment we have too little info.
I saw some suggestions (from years ago) that it might be mountable in Linux, but there was certainly no mention of the pro edition.

In that circumstance, I'd be inclined to get a nice big external USB drive, dump the files in question from Windows to the USB drive, move the USB drive to the Linux machine, and just use it as an external drive to the Linux machine. If I were concerned about losing them, I'd also copy them to my new computer and keep the USB drive as an external/backup drive to the Linux machine.

Just my two cents.

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Chances are that unless the computer is bought with linux installed, the HDD will need to be formatted.

Once you havea copy of your data on an external drive and a computer running any distro (variation of linux), simply plugging (and mounting) in your external drive will allow you to copy everything on the external drive to the new computer. ...... How long that will take depends on a number of things, cpu and amount of data being two.

Smart move.

Not that I know of...... but it's been a decade, or so, since I used Windoze.

By the way I suggest, if the option presents itself during the install process, you opt to have a separate, large, partition for home (/home).

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An interesting way to do this would be to create a Samba server on the Linux machine which could then be mounted by Windows. You could then use Macrium itself running on W7 to 'restore' its files to the Linux box over ethernet. Since Macrium is backup software it is capable of restoring the original files from its backup files on the external drive. If you have a samba server running on Linux and mounted on W7 you could 'restore' your original files over ethernet to the Linux filesystem.

The following is a tutorial on Samba for Ubuntu. I don't know if using Mint would make a difference.

https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/install...mba#1-overview

EDIT: If you have two or more external drives you could use Windows to restore files using Macrium to a second external ntfs-formatted drive. You would then plug this second drive into the Linux box and copy out the files as Linux can easily read ntfs.

The samba server is an option if you don't have enough external drives or storage space on them.

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Reisender,

The suggestion in your original post is a simple and straightforward one.

Why complicate matters?

Just copy the contents of the following W7 folders (Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Videos, Other) into newly created folders (DOX, DLOADS, PIX, VIDZ, OTHER) on an external drive.

NB Make sure that the copied files actually exist on the external drive.

Then reverse the process for the Linux drive.

Also export Firefox Bookmarks and Thunderbird profile folders or similar, if you have them.

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The simplest way, IMHO, since you already have an external drive, would be that once you have the new PC and have installed linux with a large /home partition to simply use that drive to transfer the data to the new PC.

Without knowing the details of how much data you have, nor the size of the external drive, it is hard to say how quickly it can be done, but that is the simplest even if it takes several transfer sessions.

Since you are moving from windows to linux you will want the new storage to be in the standard linux format. I feel the suggestion above to put the data on an external drive and leave it in ntfs format is possible, but also with extra risk since ntfs is not a native format to linux.

I don't have a clue about programs of that type that can be used on both systems. Additionally, a backup from a windows system restored to a linux system is likely to cause a problem due to permissions and file attributes, not to mention the file system formats. If you are able, simply keep both systems operational until the data transfer is 100% complete and verified. Then do a backup of the data from the linux system and verify that before you consider shutting down the windows system permanently

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I have both full image backups, and files and folders (incremental backups) in Macrium Reflect. The "catch" is that it's a proprietary format, not individual files. The image is one file. Each incremental backup is one file. When restoring, Macrium Reflect auto-magically expands each of its files into what it's supposed to be.

I never was able to get my Win7 PC to see my WinXP PC on my network. Maybe that was due to WinXP. I don't know. I'm thinking/hoping I can plug-in the external drive containing all of the individual files and copy them to the new Linux PC.

Please there is no risk as linux can easily read ntfs for over a decade now. NTFS read support is actually part of the kernel. Linux can also write to ntfs with fuse ntfs-3g although that would not be required to simply restore backups. On Manjaro I have both facilities built-in.

Incorrect again. The directory that is exported and shared with samba is part of the standard linux filesystem such as ext4 or xfs. In the guide I posted they exported a subdirectory of their /home directory. When new files are created they will be native linux files in ext4 or xfs. If there were issues ownership could be changed easily with chown and permissions with chmod (both run as root) for all files in the directory. The individual files will have the binary content and filenames of the corresponding Windows files but they will be new Linux files.

It doesn't matter if ntfs is used by Windows on the other end. All new files and directories created will be in ext4/xfs/btrfs ... filesystems.

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I think I know what I have to do now.

Thank you!