The good news is that it’s actually possible to migrate all your email, contacts and calendar between multiple email providers using a service provided by TrueSwitch.  What’s more, if you’re switching to Gmail, Hotmail or one of the other ‘partner’ providers for the company the service is completely free.

To use it all you need to do is enter your usernames and passwords for the two relevant accounts and wait up to 24 hours for the system to transfer everything from your old account to your new one.  What’s more, because it merely copies the email, calendar and contacts, you can also use it to completely back up an email account!

When you go to the main website, which isn’t the most usable one I’ve ever encountered, if you are switching your email to one of the providers listed on the right side of the page, listed under the “Free when you switch to our partners” link, just click the icon relevant to the email provider you are switching to.  You will then be taken to the relevant form on their website where you enter the details of the two accounts, and tell TrueSwitch what data it is that you want to transfer.

Additionally you can then set the service to continue forwarding email from your old account to your new one for up to 60 days.  This is extremely useful if you’re moving your whole account from one company to another.

But what do you then do if your old email is sitting in an Outlook PST file or Outlook Express.  Well with the latter you’ll first need to import your email into Outlook.  Then you need to make sure you have the latest version of the Outlook Connector software installed if you’re using Hotmail, or that you set up your Gmail or other account with Outlook using IMAP.

Do you know that when you’re in Outlook and looking at your email folder tree, you can simply drag and drop email from an Outlook PST file into your Hotmail connector folder, or an IMAP folder.  The emails will be moved from the PST file into the connector file and the next time you synchronise your email they will all be uploaded to the cloud to become part of your Hotmail or Gmail account.

It really couldn’t be simpler to get all of your email, from any ISP and no matter how old, into a single email service.  I’ve used it to aggregate email from two separate ISPs that I downloaded since 2001 into Outlook using a POP server, and my old now defunct Gmail account into my current Hotmail account.

I then used the TrueSwitch service to back up that entire Hotmail account, now the repository of all of my sent and received email from multiple services since 2001, into my Gmail account.  I’ve done this because the recent Hotmail outage earlier this year that deleted some people’s emails for good, including some of mine, made me a bit jumpy.

There have been other services and software packages over the years that have also been able to migrate your email, calendar and contacts between providers, but none that I’ve found are quite as powerful or as flexible.

Drive Copy 9.5 Personal is offered for free today at the Giveaway of the Day website. Some users might believe that Drive Copy is a backup software but it is listed under virtualization at the Paragon website.

Drive Copy can be used to create a virtual clone of the PC. This includes all data on the PC including the operating system, drivers, settings as well applications and files.

Drive Copy supports two virtual file formats: VMWare and MS Virtual PC. The user needs the software from the developer of the virtualization solution to use the virtual clone of the PC.

Drive Copy 9.5 Personal is offered as a 32-bit and 64-bit edition at the Giveaway of the Day website. Installation involves the usual registration at the Paragon website to receive the product key and serial number to register the product. This is done during installation.

Users can open the registration page for Drive Copy 9.5 right here to request the license information while they are downloading the virtualization software.

The Drive Copy interface lists the available tasks at the right hand.

• Migration: Migrate to another hard drive, adjust OS to new hardware
• Migrate to virtual machine: Migrate from a physical to a virtual machine
• Disk Copy and imaging: Copy partition, clone hard disk, create a compressed image of a hard drive
• Rescue and recovery: Burn recovery CD, undelete partition, file transfer wizard, log saver

Migration

The Migrate to another hard drive option allows the user to move the operating system, all files and settings from one hard drive to another on the same computer. This can be helpful if a new hard drive has been bought and connected to the computer that is either faster or more space than the old one. It could for instance be used to move the operating system to the new hard drive to get rid of the old hard drive at all in the end. All contents on the target disk will be overwritten.

Adjust OS to new hardware has to be used if the user connects a migrated operating system to another computer. This process makes the OS compatible with the computer hardware it was connected to.

Migrate to a virtual machine

This option basically creates a virtual image of the current operating system and data so that it can be used in a virtual environment.

Disk Copy and imaging

The copy partition option can be used to copy a hard drive partition to unallocated space on the same or a different hard drive.

Clone hard disk will create an exact copy of a hard disk to a different disk. All contents on the target disk will be overwritten.

Create a compressed image of a hard drive

This creates a compressed image of the hard drive which can be restored at any time using the Recovery CD. This compressed image cannot be used in a virtual environment.

Rescue and recovery

The user should start by burning the recovery CD which aids if something goes wrong.

Undelete partition can recover a partition that has been accidentally deleted.

The File Transfer Wizard can be used to copy files and folders from images.

Verdict

Paragon Drive Copy offers several interesting features. The option to migrate the operating system to a new hard drive or new computer system while adjusting the OS to the new hardware can be indispensable if a new hard drive or PC have been purchased.

Paragon Drive Copy 9.5 can be downloaded from the Giveaway of the Day website for free today. The developer website contains additional information about the software.

The first thing that we have to do is export the cookies from Internet Explorer. To do that click on File > Import and Export > Export Cookies. All cookies will be saved in a file called cookies.txt by default, leave it that way and finish the operation. Navigate to the folder where cookies.txt was created and open it in a text editor. The next step is the most important one so be extra careful.

Place a “.” before each line that starts with a domain. Example, the line “ghacks.net ..” should look like “.ghacks.net ..” afterwards. You do not need to do this for domains that look like “www.ghacks.net..”

Save cookies.txt and move it into your Firefox profile folder. Make sure Firefox is closed and you have not been using Firefox before. Firefox uses the file cookies.txt as well which means that it is populated if you have been using Firefox before.

I have not tested the following method to merge cookies but you could try it if you like. Backup cookies.txt first before you continue. Just append the lines at the end of the cookie information that are already in the cookies.txt file.

Migrating Bookmarks:

This is not complicated as well. Select File > Import and Export again and choose to export your favorites. Save the file as bookmarks.html and open up Firefox.

Click on Bookmarks > Organize (Manage) Bookmarks. A new windows with all your Firefox bookmarks should show up. Click again on File > Import from File and select the saved bookmarks.html file. Bookmarks should be imported automatically from then.

You could try and import them directly from Internet Explorer using the Import from IE option as well but this only works if both browsers are installed on the same computer.

Migrating torrents into uTorrent is a pretty simply procedure. Before you can load them into uTorrent you have to make sure that all extensions that have been added by Bitcomet, or any other client, are removed. Bitcomet for instance adds .bt! at the end of every file if you have selected it in the options. This could be a tedious task if you have many small files that you want to download.

I found a dos batch file in the uTorrent migration guide that is helpful in this case.

1. Open Notepad and write this line into it (replace “bc!” with which ever file extension you need to remove):
   @for /r %%i in (*.bc!) do @move “%%~fi” “%%~dpni”
2. In Notepad, File > Save As: RENAME.BAT
3. Open the location folder for the partially downloaded files you need to rename.
4. Drag and drop the RENAME.BAT file into this folder
5. Right click on RENAME.BAT > Open; a DOS window will briefly appear as it scrolls through all the files in the folder as they are getting renamed.

I decided to use the same download dir in uTorrent that I have used in Bitcomet. To change the download location click on Options, Preferences and select Downloads from the menu. Select the directory where your files are currently located in the field Put new Downloads in to make sure that uTorrent finds the partially downloaded files.
After the preparations are finished we have to load the torrents into uTorrent. Bitcomet has a subdirectory named Torrents in its program directory. The torrents are located there by default. Open uTorrent, click on File, Add Torrent and browse to the location where your torrent files are stored.

You can select multiple files at once. The torrents are automatically loaded into uTorrent and you should see the Done % go up if you already downloaded part of it with Bitcomet.

And that’s it. You successfully migrated from Bitcomet to uTorrent.