Links: Use Redo Rescue: Backup and Recovery and GPartEd Live to backup a working system and restore it to a new (possibly larger) drive

NOTE: Redo Rescue: Backup and Recovery was formerly known as Redo Backup. This article has been updated to show the new name.

If you are replacing an older hard drive with a newer one, possibly with more capacity, you may wonder if there is a way to do it without having to reinstall everything. The answer is often “yes”. There are many ways to do it — some are free and some cost money — but one great solution that happen to be free is to use Redo Rescue: Backup and Recovery, possibly followed by GPartEd Live. In fact, even if you aren’t planning on replacing a drive, it’s probably a good idea to back up your drives using Redo Rescue periodically, just in case a drive unexpectedly fails. If that happens you can restore from your last backup and you are back in business.

The nice thing about both Redo Rescue and GPartEd Live is that they have nice graphical users interfaces. Redo Rescue is very easy and intuitive, while GPartEd live is a only bit less so. For example, to move a partition within a drive you may need to use a click and drag operation, but that’s not explained on the screen. So, your favorite search engine may be your friend.

Here are some articles that explain how to use Redo Rescue:

Redo Backup and Recovery Tool to Backup and Restore Linux Systems (TecMint)
How To Use Redo Backup And Recovery In Windows 10 (Into Windows)
Redo Rescue Backup and Recovery Live System Gets NFS Share Support, SSH Server (9to5Linux)

Also you can search on YouTube for videos about Redo Rescue: Backup and Recovery.

If you are moving your system to a larger hard drive, a simple restore will only utilize as much of the drive as was used on the original drive size. What you can do is use GPartEd Live, another free tool, to grow your primary partition to occupy the remaining unused space. Before you can do that, you may need to move the existing swap partition to the end of the allocated space. What you need to do depends to some degree on the operating system in use on the drive you are moving, so you may need to do some searching to get instructions that apply to your particular situation.

Here are a couple of links about GPartEd that may help Linux users:

Expanding a Linux disk with gparted (and getting swap out of the way) (mwpreston.net)
How to move a partition to the end in gparted? (Super User)

And one for Windows users:

Resizing and Adding Partitions using GParted Live (bleepingcomputer.com)

Also there are many videos on YouTube about GPartEd.