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Backup or move files to new PC?

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Getting new PC and need to move files to it. What are the +/-'s of doing a backup or just copy files to new PC.

Documents, downloads, music, pictures, video

Any other files/folder should I also do? I presume will need to reinstall all programs/app's. anyway to move password files?

I plan on using external HD.

Open to suggestions

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Before we can provide information of the best way to proceed, please provide the following information:

  1. the operating system used by both the old PC and the new PC (for example Windows 10 Pro x64 Build 2004
  2. a brief description of the hardware of both the new and the old PC, including the type of drive used for Windows, for example SATA HDD, SATA SSD, M.2 SSD, either SATA or NVMe, the "BIOS" mode - your new PC will normally use UEFI  (there is a hidden EFI partition which is used to boot the PC), whereas older PC use BIOS/Legacy mode (no EFI partition). You can find out if your old PC uses UEFI or legacy mode using one of the methods described here

Ian

Larry, if it is only user files (Documents, downloads, music, pictures, video) that you are moving then I would suggest a hybrid approach.

Make a full Disk backup of the source disk drive that includes everything, i.e. OS, applications and all user data.  This is your backup resource in case something is missed in the next step.

Copy all your user files (Documents, downloads, music, pictures, video) to your external drive then move that drive to the new PC to reverse the copy of user data to that system.

If later you find that some user files or data is missing, you can use the full Disk backup to find the missing data and retrieve it, assuming you have installed ATI 2020 on the new PC to allow opening the .tibx archive file in Explorer.

Ian

Old PC is from about 2013 and running win10 1909.x

New PC is ALIENWARE AURORA R11 GAMING DESKTOP

NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 2070 SUPER 8GB GDDR6 (OC Ready)

512GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD (Boot) + 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s (Storage)

Windows 10 Home, 64-bit, English

10th Gen Intel® Core™ i7 10700F (8-Core, 16MB Cache, 2.9GHz to 4.8GHz w/Turbo Boost Max 3.0)

 

Will update new PC before doing any installing software

On related subject. New PC up and running and under network it's sees old PC. I try to login with user ID such as:

 

name & password  "email which is windows login and PW" but reports not correct. What am I doing wrong? I may have never set it up to do so?

I figure I can move some files over home network??

Larry, you need to setup sharing in Windows to allow the new PC to access files / folders on the old PC.