[bowlinggreen]

If your hard drive is still functioning more or less properly, there is no reason that you would lose any files during the copy process.

That said, given the age of your drive, I would copy all of that stuff to a new drive immediately, like today.

You may want to consider getting two external drives and copying all your files to both, just for the sake of redundancy and safety. Decent external drives are pretty cheap these days, you can pick up a 1TB WD external drive at Best Buy or wherever for about $50 US.

Given that you have spent dozens or hundreds of hours downloading and organizing your collection, balancing that extra $50 against the wailing and hairpulling that you will be suffering through if your backup drive goes clonk and all of your images are lost is kind of a no-brainer.

For copying, I'd recreate the folder structure on your new drive and then carefully copy over each subfolder full of images. if you are going to lose stuff because your old drive is getting touchy it ought to give you an error message when it can't copy. If you try to ghost the whole thing and it fails you won't know what you can actually recover or not.