I'm putting together my dream PC from scratch and I'm trying to figure out the best way to transfer data from my old hard drives. I've done a lot of upgrades in the past, but now I want to be more thoughtful about this process. I have multiple drives, some of which are a mess and others that I've started fresh. I've gone from Intel to AMD and back to Intel with Nvidia, and now I want to ensure my new build is as clean as possible in terms of drivers and software.
I would like to keep some of my data without bringing over old software that may include outdated drivers. I'm considering consolidating my non-application files onto one or two drives and wiping the rest. Is it worth trying to automate the process of finding and organizing all my files, or should I just manually sift through everything? How do you approach this kind of transfer when setting up a new PC?
2 Answers
I’ve done this before, and I just transitioned my hard drive over to my new build without much hassle. It worked fine for me! But I do run some driver cleaning software after the transfer. This time, I’m also doing a fresh Windows install, so I want to make sure I start off right and maybe reorganize things a bit while I’m at it.
I’m looking for a tool that could find specific file types, like all my Microsoft Office files, move them to a designated folder, and clear them from the original location. That way, I can go through additional files as I find them and just disregard anything that seems unnecessary or outdated.
I like to keep the number of physical disks low as I upgrade, usually picking drives in the $100-$150 range to consolidate every 6-8 years. When I do copy data, I utilize robocopy for transferring files. I make a clean Windows install, copy my important data files to the new drive, and then reformat the old app drive.
I'll definitely check out robocopy! I’m mostly worried about those stray Office files like Word docs and Excel sheets. If I could write a script that crawls through all my drives and organizes them into folders for docx, ppt, and xlsx, that would be so helpful. I don’t need to delete them from the originals right away; I can wipe the old drives after.