Transfer Data between two external Hard Drives

sahilx

Honorable
Nov 21, 2013
11
0
10,510
Hi,
I have 46 gb worth of Videos/Photos saved in a folder on an external HD lets call it drive A. Drive A is a 2 TB external WD elements HD that I have connected to my pc.
I have another 2TB external HD lets call it drive B. Drive B is a WD my book.

What I did yesterday was I hit copy on the folder in A. Then I went into B and hit paste. The process took about 11mins. I later thought I should have saved this to my new pcs internal HD first.

Question: Is it safe to copy irreplaceable videos/photo memories from one external HD to another?
Both are AC powered and both were connected to the usb ports on my pc.

Would this process have been safer if I had transferred this 46GB folder from drive A to my pcs internal HD first and then to drive B?

In case your wondering I do have this folder saved on my old win XP pc so I can get it from there as well. Last month I bought a new win 8.1 desktop computer I'm planning on putting my win XP drive in an enclosure and then connecting it to my new pc to transfer my data to my new pc's internal. Is this safe to do as well?

I'm worried because I never copied data directly from one external hd to another external HD without first copy/pasting to my pcs internal HD.

Both my WD external HDs are right next to each other on a carpeted floor. Should this matter? Theres only an inch space between these 2. My pc and both externals are plugged into the same upc surge protector.

My final question is:
If the power had cut from Drive B which is where the data was being written to would drive B have gotten corrupt? Would drive A have been safe had that power been cut since that was being read from. I'm wondering hypothetical of course. Luckily this didn't happen. It just seems strange that a pc can act as a bridge of sorts during copy/paste between 2 external HD's.
I have yet to verify if all my videos/photos do work on Drive B. I checked briefly everything seems to be there. Would I have gotten an Error if corruption did happen?


Thanks for your time and technical expertise