Basically, my new computer came in and I want to transfer essential files over from the old to the new one without yanking the hard drive. I kind of don’t want to open the casing of the old tower unless I absolutely have to: bad things can happen when I do that, man. Am I gonna have to go out and get an external hard drive, or can I finesse this somehow with the right cables?
8 thoughts on “Bleg for computer file transfer guidance.”
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Is using a USB stick an option?
Sure, I guess. My priorities are my personal files, my passwords and preferences, and my non-Steam stuff like Campaign Cartographer and my modded games.
…And Amazon helpfully shows me a Seagate 2TB External Portable Hard Drive for $70. On the one hand, stop freaking me out, Amazon. On the other hand: …OK, yes, that *would* do it, wouldn’t it?
Another option would be to make a network shared folder on the new pc and copy the files over that way
which has the advantage of costing $0 and available immediately
I’ve done this. It’s slightly faster and easier than the flash drive method (but that isn’t exactly difficult or slow, either.)
Alas, Microsoft is telling me ‘no.’ I’m just getting the external drive. We need one around the house anyway.
I spent a year doing this for my old job.
Basically, any sort of connection between the two computers will work (I used either an ethernet cable, or a thunderbolt cable, depending on the computers in question). However, typically there are safeguards in place to keep someone from just randomly remotely connecting to your computer and downloading your personal files. For instance, Windows will ONLY allow a user to access the user files on a computer if it recognizes the folders that those files are in as belonging to that user. So if my network account has a set of user folders on a given computer, I can copy those folders to another computer and open them there. But any user folders that aren’t attached to my network account aren’t going to be accessible.