I’ve replaced my old laptop with a new one and I have over 350GB worth of data to move over, moving all of it to an external drive and then moving them to the new laptop doesn’t seem efficient and it seems like it’s gonna take forever
I know there are some special cables that can do that but I don’t wanna waste money on something that I’m only gonna use once every 5 years at most.
Lots of people are suggesting network cables and the likes.
But if the data is so valuable you want to migrate it then isn’t it also worth backing it up? I’d buy an external HD, copy the data onto that and then copy it to your new laptop and keep the hard drive somewhere safe as a backup.
my home network is quite slow and the ethernet port on my old laptop is damaged, it only works sometimes so it’ll definitely disconnect during the process.
Buy a cheap USB to Ethernet adapter then and directly connect the two computers via Ethernet. USB to USB is possible but it’s not worth the time and effort, network will be faster and easier. Or why not just buy a cheap external hard drive? According to Amazon a 500gb external hard drive can be had for $30 USD.
Then use/get a usb data stick and transfer em that way or subsequently if it’s the laptop you want to transfer off of, remove the HDD or SSD and get an adapter to plug the drive into usb.
Look for sata to usb adapters
Do you have a router? I mean something resembling a LAN? If so the outbound network speeds wouldn’t matter.
I do have a router, but I have to use wifi for the old laptop, does it affect the transfer speed?
When you say it’s going to ‘take forever’ how long are we talking? Can you try a small batch and see how long it takes? If you really are only doing this every 5 years or so and don’t want to spend any money then the setup you have may be your best option.
If you want to spend $10 or so you could buy a cat6 Ethernet cable (and you may also need to buy a dongle for the laptop). The transfer would take a few hours.
Depending on your internet speed you could also sign up for a single month of Dropbox and do it that way (again, about $10).
For the quickest (and most expensive way) you could purchase an external nvme/SSD which would do the job in a few minutes. Couple hundred dollars but then you’ve got a very useful device that you can use in future.
As someone else said, either a USB transfer cable or
a USB network adapter and your local network.
Use an ethernet cord, if youre asking this question then you likely have one lying around. I did it a few months ago, had to jump some hoops like disconnecting from all networks and making folders discoverable to get it working though
If you’re going to directly connect them using just a single cable then it needs to be a crossover cable and he’ll need to set the IP manually on each end. Most people don’t have a crossover cable lying around. It would be easier to plug both computers into a router/switch and do a network transfer or just get a USB adapter for whatever kind of drive is in the old computer.
Edit: it’s been a while since I needed to dot do that and apparently modern Ethernet doesn’t need specialized cables anymore. TIL.
