[llith]

Hello there!

My husband's system, a Dell Dimension desktop running XP, is slowly dying and we want to transfer many gigabytes worth of music files to a new system he plans to purchase which will likely run Vista. I was wondering how best to accomplish this. Thanks for any assistance!

Lauri Ann

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how is the system dying is the important question, the idea of either slaving the harddrive of the old computer inside the new computer(if it is a desktop) or using an external harddrive caddie(if it is a laptop) is probably the best option. One will have to change the permissions to allow the new system to read to old one but that is fairly easy.

but the important thing to think about here is that even the new harddrive could die on you and then you have lost all, so I suggest not so much transfering the data from the old computer to the new one only but, and this is only in the case that it another part of the old computer that dying on you leaving the old harddrive usable, of transfering the data from the old harddrive to the new computer and then formatting the old harddrive to give you an empty usable drive and then transfering back the data, in this case music files, to the old but now empty harddrive, in other words mutual backup between two drives

eitherway, I hope you have noticed that it is not a good idea to only have one harddrive with everything stored on it, harddrives like humans have a lifespan and like humans it is not the old that always die first, in fact I find a lot of the older drives to be more robust than the new ones.

Edited by fleamailman, 26 July 2007 - 11:38 AM.

[fleamailman]

how is the system dying is the important question, the idea of either slaving the harddrive of the old computer inside the new computer(if it is a desktop) or using an external harddrive caddie(if it is a laptop) is probably the best option. One will have to change the permissions to allow the new system to read to old one but that is fairly easy.

but the important thing to think about here is that even the new harddrive could die on you and then you have lost all, so I suggest not so much transfering the data from the old computer to the new one only but, and this is only in the case that it another part of the old computer that dying on you leaving the old harddrive usable, of transfering the data from the old harddrive to the new computer and then formatting the old harddrive to give you an empty usable drive and then transfering back the data, in this case music files, to the old but now empty harddrive, in other words mutual backup between two drives

eitherway, I hope you have noticed that it is not a good idea to only have one harddrive with everything stored on it, harddrives like humans have a lifespan and like humans it is not the old that always die first, in fact I find a lot of the older drives to be more robust than the new ones.

Edited by fleamailman, 26 July 2007 - 11:38 AM.

[Tyger]

Like the mailman said, there's no such thing as too much backup if you value your files. And easy way to transfer files between machine is to use a FTP server on the one your sending the files to, and an FTP client on the one sending the files. That sounds backwards, but it's actually the best procedure. However in your particular case what I would do is get an external hard drive, quite cheap these days, copy the files onto it, you may need to install a USB2.0 card in the machine to get any speed out of it, and them later copy them onto the new machine.

[llith]

Thank you for the speedy replies! We will be cleaning up our act and backing stuff up from now on.

Lauri-Ann