How to copy your hard drive to a smaller hard drive (eg SSD): Backupper Standard

Especially when you want to upgrade to a faster, but often smaller, SSD hard drive, you need a way to quickly copy everything on your existing hard drive to the newer hard drive. One of my favourite disk copying tools is Clonezilla, but it isn't good with copying to a smaller capacity drive. You need a tool which can manage the change of partition sizes at the same time as copying the data. A new free tool I found which will do this is called Backupper Standard by AOMEI Technology.

Backupper Standard includes a Cloning tool which allows copying an entire hard drive to a smaller capacity hard drive. Their website has more information about this feature and how it works here and here. (I think the cloning used to be part of a separate free tool, but now it has been incorporated into Backupper Standard. They also have another free tool especially for Windows 8.1, Windows 8 and Windows 7, but I haven't used this yet. It is called AOMEI Backupper Standard For Win7.)

By the way, obviously you cannot clone a larger hard drive to a smaller one if there is too much data on the larger hard drive, too much to fit on the smaller one. You will need to cull out some stuff first!

Can't change ownership or membership of a distribution group in Office 365 ("You don't have sufficient permissions" error message)?

I had migrated over to Office 365 from onsite Exchange 2007 server. Some distribution groups weren't working and needed users added to their membership. However, when my client tried to doing it through the administrative interface, they got the error, "You don't have sufficient permissions". Looking myself I noticed that the ownership of the group was not set-up properly, there didn't seem to be any owner!

I'm not sure of the cause, but perhaps the particular groups used to be security groups with Active Directory or something. But thanks to the Microsoft KB, a solution was found.

Essentially I needed to login to the Exchange Online server via Remote Powershell, and then I could use the Set-DistributionGroup cmdlet fix things up. This cmdlet allowed me to assign ownership to the problem distribution group.

These are the references I used to get to this result:

• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2731947 (The overall solution, explaining the cmdlet options)
• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj984289(v=exchg.150).aspx (how to Connect to Exchange Online Using Remote PowerShell)