I have mentioned several times that I have been struggling with a sound issue on my PC. I consulted with a technician and explained in detail the issues and we determined that because my hard drive was cloned I had simply inherited the problem from my previous PC. So, I am taking that major leap to completely format my C;\ drive and reinstall a fresh copy of windows and start from scratch! Yikes! Anyway, in Reaper's Plugins folder there are a ton of them listed there. Would it be a simple matter of me just copying that folder and then putting them in there again once I reinstall Reaper, or, do they in some way need to be 'REGISTERED' in Reaper to work? What is the best strategy to put all my plugins back? BTW, I did export my configuration files and save it to an external storage hard drive. What say you all about this?

There are plugins that simply use some files (usually not in the Reaper folder but e.g. in some ...\steinberg\... folder). Here, copying the appropriate files would suffice to make them usable. Others (most that are more complex and/or need some licensing, e.g. Kontakt) need a dedicate installation. With many you need a de-installation (with the old PC !!!) before being able to install them. With even others (e.g. Native Instruments') you need to contact the company to do a de-installationm, as they don't provide an automatic function for this. Conclusion: cloning the disk is a very bad idea. -Michael

Cloning has its problems especially when switching machines. One is never exactly the same as another and you always wind up with driver and registry bugs unless you start again clean. I keep things like Kontakt libraries on a separate drive. Kontakt (and some other programs) only care about the ID of the disk where the host is installed. The other data could be stored anywhere. And the host program is tiny compared to the files it accesses. In fact, it's a good idea to run a multi-drive system. OS and core essentials on C, other programs on D, data on E, something like that. In cases where you come across the Bork and resistance is futile, you may have to do some reinstallation but the bulk of your stuff is still there. I also clone off all drives (including C) to externals from time to time though. In a lot of cases you can then clone back and any necessary disk-ID registrations will be back in place. Cases of actual physical drive failure are relatively rare (my SSDs have lived in three different machines now and are still healthy) and there'll always be some work to do if your C drive goes sproing. But the sort of approach I'm describing will drastically reduce your recovery time if you have a really bad day. It's a shame it has to be this way...

Just to be clear... the time proper cloning is a bad idea is if there is some particular issue one is trying escape and they don't want to clone the issue to the new drive or as mentioned above switching hardware. Based on the OPs situation, it's probablly a good idea to start with a fresh install but they could still have issues if the problem is driver/config related and are unaware of if. I cloned my 160GB OS SSD to a 500GB OS SSD without issue a few months ago, I cloned it to a new drive, swapped the drives, rebooted, not one single issue and I have pretty much all the plugins that would care about such things and they didn't (Waves, NI and so on). It was a less than 1-hour process before I was back up and running.

I got an idea: In the PC in question I have 3 Drives. C:\ drive is a solid state drive D:\ current DATA drive (ALL data is on this drive) E:\ freshly formatted hard drive What about either cloning or just copying the C:\ drive contents to the E:\ drive and then format the C:\ drive. How would that help me?

Done deal! Meaning that is w2hat I am going to do! iI will clone the C:\ drive to the E:\ drive.

Well, the PC is in the shop, the C:\ drive will be formatted and a fresh install of Windows installed. I also decided to keep the software that I reinstall to an extreme minimum and that is because I have a second computer networked with the one being worked on that I don't want to have the same software installed on both PCs unless absolutely necessary.

If you clone from a system that had a problem... Well yeah, you get an exact copy of the problem! "Oh no, cloning must be bad!" Come on now... Do you make copies of your resume or start over each time? Do you freak out if you copied your resume that had a typo and blame that on the copy machine?! (Sorry if that's a little over the top! Just trying to make an analogy. :)) Build your fresh clean install system. Get it working. Got it working? Now clone it! Call the drive you cloned it to "backup". Now when you screw something up on your system you can boot into the clone. Then you can clone back the other direction to restore. The pros here are: Always having a drive kicking around that can boot your computer. Being able to recover from disasters without knowing a single technical thing about fixing it at the nuts and bolts level. If you only educate yourself to that point, you'll be mostly self sufficient with your computer. The only answer if you truly don't want to even learn basics like: Your hard drive is a little file cabinet that holds your stuff. How to copy hard drives (cloning). The only choice would be to hire someone to manage your system. Your personal IT service. This isn't completely unreasonable. But you would have to pay for that. For the love of whatever people have love for when someone says that, stay far away from Worst Purchase, Leek Squad, and that kind of fly by night scammy stuff! That's not who you hire for this. They'll play dumb and take your money. I'd look for a college kid instead. If you just force yourself to get to the point where you can copy your hard drive and manage your stuff, you'll be able to avoid scams and keep working most of the time. Only call in the big guns for the hard jobs. You don't have to learn anything like calculus or even programming for this. We're talking office filing skills here. :D But you asked about plugins! Reaper's proprietary plugins install with Reaper. If you have saved settings presets, they will export/import with export/import config. Any 3rd party plugins are installed to your OS and become a resource to any DAW app installed. They are NOT installed to a particular DAW app! Semantics... Hence, you'll find them in your OS Library directory. The installers will put them there by default. DAW apps will look there first by default. Just let this be and don't move the mountain. Back to your problem: The audio system with multiple audio apps and all that and the Windows options for using all that CAN be a bit complex to run! Much more complex than just cloning a hard drive! You're just going to have to learn this so you know the order to make the mouse clicks. If you're basically saying "talk to the hand" here, now you have to hire a studio assistant to prep your system and switch things around as you need them. You'll have to pay for that. Kind of expensive. Like hiring a chauffeur in bang for the buck I would think.

Serr, I hear you! On my newer machine that is in the shop, at least at the moment, my plan is to only have Reaper and Google Chrome. Everything else will be on the second networked PC. As many of you may have over time I have accumulate and cannibalized working part from PCs that I am replacing, in my case, 2 hard drives that I installed in the new PC in addition to the C:\ drive. A long time ago I got an external 2TB hard drive back when that was a HUGE amount of storage space. It still works. I know that a lot of you out there who have a ton of projects on your system it is a HUGE problem to do what I am doing, but, for me I am not in that position so it will be a simple matter of getting Reaper configured to the way I want it to work for my needs. So, in the end I am going to look at this whole thing as a fresh start, just like a drug addict that gets into recovery! (I'm 818 days clean!) I realized I have a lot of software on there that I truly no longer use, so cleaning up the drive this way I am looking at it as a good thing. Over the last several months I have been learning a lot about how to configure Reaper to my specific needs but have just been too busy to get too far into it. I see this as a great opportunity to once again get a fresh start and take my time to set things up. I am not a pro mixer and do not rely on this for my income so I can take my time to learn about that so that as things come up I will know what to do about it. Before I took my PC to the shop I did find out how to save my settings in preferences and did that and put that file on the other HD with my other data. But, once again seeing this as a fresh start and a chance to get to know more about the inner workings of Reaper meaning learning more about the preferences, what they are for and how the affect the performance of the software. QUESTION: I know that there are no 'magic answers' or just one way to do most of whatever your doing, but, when it comes to configuring the preferences in Reaper does anyone follow any kind of 'checklist' so that you don't forget to set the preferences that are important to you that you would be willing to share?

Enjoy cleaning house. Just two suggestions. 1. As soon as you get your system up and running, create Windows recovery media on a USB stick and keep it safe in a drawer. That's pretty much what they'll have done at the shop and are charging you for. 2. I'd advise against Chrome - Google's entire business model is about selling your online habits. Maybe you don't mind that, but it leaves you open to social engineering cyberattacks. Give Firefox a try instead and research some security plugins for it. Paranoid? Perhaps, but even those of us with nothing to hide get our activity scooped up into enormous metadata dumps if we don't cover ourselves. Let's be careful out there.