[quote=gzz]
In any case, the “booting” is done from the main drive on your new PC. The old drive from your old PC connects a lot like a USB flash drive. It happens automatically. So if the drive itself isn’t corrupted, you plug it in with the cable I linked to, and it shows up on “My Computer” as an extra hard drive.[/quote]
Great to hear.
[quote=gzz]There are some easy software fixes for a slightly bad hard drive, which you can run by just hooking it up to a new working PC.
If those don’t work, you’re looking at costly data recovery services that will be $2,000+.
[/quote]
[quote=Coronita]
Not worth the cost of doing this unless the data is absolutely must save because often times what these people do is very painful and tedious. (Disassembly your hard drive, finding an identical drive, physically move the platters from your drive to one that is working, etc.) I’ve done this myself one time. It was painful and time spent versus the importance of the lost data, ended up not being worth it… [/quote]
When my new computer arrives, I’ll try the easy methods. I backed up all my pix/videos (several hundred GB of family pix/vids but, sadly, none of Evelyn Lin) a few months ago. And google photos should have a lot of the more recent stuff. Whatever else was on there was backed up recently enough, I guess. It would save some hassle to have it back, but nowhere near 2k worth of hassle, so I won’t bother with the expensive options if it comes to that. I wasn’t aware that those were my options so thanks for the info, gzz and flu.
[quote=gzz]
In my view the best system for regular PC users is to have an SSD as their windows C drive and use a regular HD for large seldomly used files plus as a windows backup. There are other backup options for even more important stuff, but most failures will not hit both drives at once so this will be a good setup for most people.
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[quote=Coronita]
For your new system, besides getting an SSD as your main drive in your computer, I would also an external USB RAID drive (with 2 disk redundancy at minimum) and setup a backup schedule to regularly backup important files like pictures/videos/media to it….
[/quote]
Seems like good (and similar) ideas. Thanks to the input here, I’ll definitely go with something like that. If there are particular pros/cons to those different setups, I’d love to hear them.
[quote=Coronita]
In addition to the raid backup, I also backup my photos to Google Photos. if you run out of storage, create a new account each year and segment the photos per year… And for video, I upload them to YouTube private and Google Photos. Pictures and videos are backed up to the cloud and to the raid drive…… [/quote]
New account every year. That’s a great idea! Definitely doing that.