My mother’s work computer is becoming too slow for her preference, and she tasked me with finding her a new one, and she also wants me to move all of her data once the computer is purchased. What is the best way for me to transfer all her data (which is a little less than a terabyte) to her new computer so that it seems like its not even a new computer at all?
Transferring ALL data from one pc to another
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personally I would get an external hard drive and copy everything onto that.
then copy that onto the new PC.
being about 1TB to move, there will be no shortcuts, a lot of data has to be copied - twice.
if you were already running backups on the old PC, than half the job is already done, but hey, we all know the answer for that one.
if it’s already up in the cloud, you could just continue to use Dropbox, OneDrive etc.
the main folders to copy are; Documents, Pictures, Music, Videos, Downloads, Desktop.
then you should export your bookmarks from the current browser and save them.
don’t forget the emails, and that depends on the program used and whether the email account is POP or IMAP.
then you have passwords to dig out and software to reload.
so don’t expect this to be a “seems like it’s not even a new computer at all” experience at all!
and by work PC, if you mean a business at home, all is good, that’s just another way to say home PC but if it is a PC at an office/business than the IT Department has probably got all sorts of lock downs on it to prevent users from fiddling with stuff. -
Thanks for the help, the pc is at an office, but it’s my dad’s small business, just him, my mom, and one other worker, so it might as well be a home computer.
Could you recommend me a video or online guide that can take me through this process? I know how to copy data and things like that, but exporting passwords and bookmarks, as well as using dropbox or onedrive is not my strong suit. Also, my parents use Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, and basically all things microsoft for their work, is it easy to transfer that data using Onedrive, and how should I go about doing it?Comment
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with the data, that will just be a copy/paste to the external drive, then another copy/paste from that to the new PC.
software will need to be reinstalled.
passwords will need to be re-entered.
depending on the browser used, they all have an export feature, it’s slight;y different per browser, quick Google search will be your friend there.
the Dropbox/OneDrive idea was just an alternative to using an external drive, if you you don’t have an online cloud account already, don’t worry about that now.
basically, setup up the new one beside the old one, and depending on and amount a data in question, it may be as simple as using a large capacity USB stick and transferring the files using that.
there’s no magic bullet with this, it’ll be a repetitive process of copy and pasting, documents, copy and pasting pictures, etc, remembering passwords for software, social media, email accounts etc.
each step in itself is easy, there’ll just be a lot of these little steps to do.Comment
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