Turns out I’ve got an old PS3. Seems weird to say that but it is a very early version. It only had a 40Gb HDD, for example. So in order to take advantage of the PSN Welcome Back I had to upgrade my HDD.

Having read the instructions I knew that backing up, installing the new disk and restoring the system should be relatively simple. Still, I didn’t expect it to go quite as smoothly as it did.

So, Sunday, I went into town and bought a 320GB disk from yoyotech. They may not be the cheapest but they are competitive and working full-time is not very compatible with internet shopping, anyway.

Then, on Monday, my lovely wife borrowed an external HDD from work for me to do the back-up. Bless her.

I was pleasantly surprised that the PS3 backup routine uses a file structure that allows multiple, time-stamped back-ups on the same disk. That’s cool, eh? I did a couple of back-ups just to be sure and then dived in.

Actually changing the drive was easy. I’ve done loads of laptop HDD changes in the past and it was really no different. Although, I’ll wager the screws on the disk caddy weren’t tightened by a human. If they were, that human was having a bad day.

The restore was just as easy as the back-up. A couple of restarts later and everything was exactly as it had been before except now I have 8x the HDD space.

Kind of dull but I am delighted it was that easy. I really didn’t need any hassle!