Replacing an old hard drive

[halvar]

Originally Posted by sea-man

Try putting it in a sealed waterproof bag in the fridge overnight, then try to copy all the data over the next day.

Please do not do that. Rapid changes in environmental conditions will hurt or kill it. Hard disks need time to adjust to the environment (temperature). That's why you should not turn on a drive immediately if it was stored outside during winter (e.g. delivery truck).

And I fully support bowlinggreen's statement. Could not have said it better.

Originally Posted by bowlinggreen

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.

[NeonKnite]

Redundancy. Redundancy. Redundancy.

If you value your collection, at minimum you should have it backed up on a second hard drive, if not a third copy offsite somewhere.

[cicciobuki]

Originally Posted by NeonKnite

Redundancy. Redundancy. Redundancy.

If you value your collection, at minimum you should have it backed up on a second hard drive, if not a third copy offsite somewhere.

Agreed.

Also, don't trust your Windows 10 too much in this. I just had a whole folder disappear on me in W10 !
Lucky for me i had it backed up on an external HD. I lost my time in renaming and sorting out these files, but at least i still have my 'rough' files...

[Ace1965]

I got it done. I did it in sections. I would take about 24 folders at a time and transfer them. The only time I got a little scared was today when I came home at lunch and transferred some of my biggest folders. It was about 110,000 total images so I just left it going and went back to work. Got back home to see that my computer had apparently reset. But I checked and all of the folders had made it over. That just left about 12,00 unlabeled images I had on the Lacie drive that were not in folders. Transferred them over and it was finally done.

Glad I did it because the new drive is much faster. No lags at all.

[DarkTrancer]

My 2 cents: Unstoppable Copier by roadkil.net

[Jism Jim]

Originally Posted by Ace1965

I got it done. I did it in sections. I would take about 24 folders at a time and transfer them. The only time I got a little scared was today when I came home at lunch and transferred some of my biggest folders. It was about 110,000 total images so I just left it going and went back to work. Got back home to see that my computer had apparently reset. But I checked and all of the folders had made it over. That just left about 12,00 unlabeled images I had on the Lacie drive that were not in folders. Transferred them over and it was finally done.

Glad I did it because the new drive is much faster. No lags at all.

as already advised by others: get another drive, copy everything from the new drive to the second new drive and dump the old one.

As soon as a hard disk starts making ticking noises, replace it.

[befuddled]

I noticed you got it done. Excellent! I am a little late to the game, but it's still worth mentioning you should image your drives/partitions. There are many fine imaging programs, such as Paragon and Acronis. I've used a lesser known product, Terabyte Software's Image for Windows, which has worked very well for me.

Having imaging software and making images is something everyone should do, especially on your drive that the PC boots from and that holds all your programs. If the drive crashes, you get a new one and restore the image. *Snap* you're back up and running in short order. Everything is there just as it was on the day you made the image: the OS, the installed applications, and all user data. Naturally, any programs or data you added after that date are not on that image.

It's worth mentioning that the image is exactly that -- an image. If the drive(s) you imaged were infected with viruses, the image will retain them and restore them when you restore the image to a new drive. So, keep that in mind. Viruses are another reason that you should have a drive image on hand. In this case, an image of a fresh, clean install of your OS and applications that is virus free. If you ever get badly infected, you restore your clean image and you're back in business with a clean machine.

If you've not used imaging software, I urge you to buy some and learn to use it Besides being able to restore the image of one drive to another drive and be back up and running in short order, the image doubles as a data backup. Most, if not all, imaging software lets you mount the image and copy files from it. And, really, you should make 2 images, because nothing's perfect. Remember: when it comes to your data, paranoia is your best friend.