How to Swap SSD and Reboot With a Back-Up Image of Original

[hankwasher]

I recently got a new Lenovo 13 with middle of the road specs and am upgrading the RAM and storage.

The RAM was a breeze and no problem.

The storage on the other hand is worrying me. I am pretty novice and need some advice on how to go about swapping the SSD. From other posts I concluded that I want to make a back-up image of the current SSD and use that to reboot the new one once installed.

So my question is how do I go about doing this. I understand how to make a back-up image onto an external drive, but beyond that am not entirely sure what to do.

Do I need to make a recovery disk? And if so can it be a bootable USB because the Lenovo 13 doesn't have a disk drive.

Would really appreciate a step-by-step run down of how to do this, or a link to something along those lines.

Thanks for any advice.

 

[woodson75]

Get a usb > SATA cable and plug in the new ssd externally. Then clone your existing drive to the new drive using something like Macrium Reflect. Here's a good guide from the folks at How-to-Geek, including the all important recovery media setup: http://www.howtogeek.com/199068/how-to-upgrade-your-existing-hard-drive-in-under-an-hour/