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Michael Baker Eternal Order Near a river in the Midwest 11172 Posts |
My workhorse computer bit the dust the other day, and I'm struggling with a tiny dinosaur now just to try and communicate. Very limiting right now.
I plan to buy a new one very soon, but will obviously want to transfer the files from my old one. The hard drive was about 80% used on the old one, and naturally I don't want to be the owner of a brand new computer with only 20% free space left. What is the best way to do this?
~michael baker
The Magic Company |
Futureal Inner circle 1695 Posts |
How old was your last machine? Chances are that hard drive storage specs have gone up considerably and what was 80% capacity on your old machine is now much less on a newer model.
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rossmacrae Inner circle Arlington, Virginia 2475 Posts |
If it were my problem, and if I had the ability (dunno how ancient that old computer was...) I'd find a way to get the files off the old drive ... maybe mounting the old drive in the second hard-drive bay that your new machine may very well have. There will be some jumper settings to change at the very least, but you may find this easiest.
Alternatively, get that old data onto data-only DVDs and add them to the drive on the new computer. Might take a friend to do. Nobody ever does enough backing up of their files (including me) and then we get this hard lesson ... and we still don't do it. Wait till you have a really big drive and most of a terabyte isn't backed up... |
Nosher Loyal user 261 Posts |
Futureal is on the money. If your computer was pretty old, you might be pleasantly surprised with the HD specs on a replacement.
You can buy stand alone 1TB backup drives now with built in no-brainer auto backup software, cheap as chips - for next time. Lastly, it might be worthwhile to do a bit of housekeeping when you transfer your files. The last time I swapped to a new PC I went through my "must keep" files and found a lot of duplicates,a lot of obselete stuff and a lot of "why-did-I-save-that" or "will-I-ever-really-use/need-that files". Nowadays I use Jungle Disk to back up to Amazon storage. Costs pennies a month and even if the house goes up in smoke I'll still have my digital stuff.
Escapemaster-in-chief from all sorts of houdingplaces - Finnegans Wake
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Michael Baker Eternal Order Near a river in the Midwest 11172 Posts |
All good advice. Thanks guys. I'll ask a lot of questions when I go shopping.
~michael baker
The Magic Company |
Ray Tupper. Special user NG16. 749 Posts |
Try this Michael,an external hard drive(your old one).As mentioned above,but no need to fit it into the new puter,just link it up when needed.Very simple and the watchword is......Cheap!
http://www.geeks.com/products_sc.asp?cat=405 Cheers,Ray.
What do we want?
A cure for tourettes! When do we want it? C*nt! |
magicgettogether Special user Michigan 556 Posts |
If the hard drive is good, hook it into the new computer as a slave (should be a dip switch on the old drive and the hard drive cable on the new computer should have a spot for it), then you can access the actual hard drive and keep you new hard drive fresh. An external Hard drive is great for backups and are relatively inexpensive now, I think they have them at Walmarts. That would give you 2 hard drives and one overall backup.
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