Hate to answer my own question but...

I asked what I should do now that I have changed OS and am afraid that old OS snaps will make "less clean" new OS snaps. Could I remove all snaps and archives of old OS safely and make a new primary? Would I have to uninstall/reinstall FD-ISR after deleting old ones? Do I sound like I probably shouldn't own a computer? Man, I wish my meds would kick in!

 

LOL....easy on those meds. These are valid questions.

It sounds like your worried that your old OS snapshots are using too much space and you'd like to reclaim it since your now using the new OS regularly.

I would recommend you take or update your final archive of each snapshot of the old OS your wanting to discard. Your archives should be on a different drive (preferrably an external one for safe storage).

Once you've successfully archived all of the old OS snapshots you want to keep you may Remove them using FD-ISR. This will delete the snapshots off of your working drive and free up space. Good idea to do a defrag after this process.

If ever you want to run the old OS then its a matter of creating an empty snapshot and updating it from one of your archives.

No. Removing (deleting) snapshots doesnt effect any other snapshot. Each snapshot is an independant OS.

EDIT: if you decide that you want to delete some archives, make sure you do it through FD-ISR. What i mean is dont use Windows Explorer to delete them even though i think you get a permission denied message if you tried it by the latter.

EDIT2: I've just noticed another post you made that said you upgraded your FD-ISR. Before doing your final archives you need to boot into each one of the snapshots you intend to archive and install the new version of FD-ISR in order to upgrade it. I think having older versions of FD-ISR archived could cause problems when trying to restore from them. Perhaps someone in this forum with more experience can confirm this for you.

 

Thanks carfal, I just tried archiving an old snap and it began by stating it was, " Starting Microsoft...VSS" 3 mins later it had not done anything so I tried to sto process but had to use task manager to do it. Hmmm...I heard a lot of gripes about using VSS and wonder if i am about to join the choir. There is a "Getting Started" option that is for a first snap but it suggests I use copy/update instead. Perhaps i can go ahead and use that and make new Primary of new OS. Whattya think? I really wan to do tis before adding stuff to the new OS.

 

If you intend to eventually get rid of all of your old OS snapshots and leave only your new OS then i would recommend that you do do a second snapshot of your current new OS by using the copy/update option. (Actually its a good idea to do a copy of your new OS anyway).

Whether you use the getting started wizard or click on the copy/update icon to start the wizard is up to you (it makes no difference on the outcome). Make sure you choose the new snapshot to be a <new snapshot>. (not an archive....you cant boot from archives so if your in trouble you need at least one other OS to boot from.) You can however also make an archive of your new OS so as to have something to fall back on should things really go haywire.

After you create your <new snapshot> make sure you boot into it to make sure it works! As a rule, its a good idea to boot into a snapshot at least once to make sure it works before making archives of the said snapshot, otherwise you may be archiving a snapshot that doesnt boot.

Dont forget to upgrade the FD-ISR program in all of the old OS snapshots your wanting to archive for maximum compatibility and stability. I dont know if this is the cause of the long pause you mentioned during the archiving of an old snapshot. I will say however that a long pause during the indexing of files and folders during a copy/update does occur sometimes on my system and may in fact be a normal process on your system as well, so maybe try and be a little more patient the next time you try it (wait for 5-6 min next time ......I know that 3 min is a long time, but it takes as long as it takes). If you still get no joy then perhaps somebody else on this forum has some ideas.

 

If it is indexing, you can see the process happening on your screen, it will tell you so and you can see the number of folders as they are added.

Acadia

 

Thanks to you all. Problems solved and beyond. I posted a new thread because I hope my experience can help others having a similar place.