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copy large amount of data

Forum Storage : General Storage - copy large amount of data

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Hi,
I am new to this forum and don't know a lot about computers so please bear with me. My friend has lended me his external hard drive with 350GB music on it. I would like to copy it on a larger external hard drive. What will be the easiest and fastest method to accomplish it? I tried searching forum but could not find the answer. May be I don't know where to look for it. Please help.

Message edited by new2toms on 04-24-2008 at 09:00:45 PM

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Just let it copy the files and go out and drink a cup of thee!

There's not really a "fastest way" of doing it.

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Reply to FeareX

You will have to connect both external drives to a computer, then just copy directly from one to the other.

As the guy above me mentioned, there is no real fast way to do it.

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Reply to rallyimprezive

You'll need to tell us what interfaces the external hard drives have. There's eSATA, firewire, and USB hookups. eSATA is the fastest, but the most common connection is USB.

Just connect both hard drives to your USB ports, located either on the front of the computer or on the back:

The drives will show up in 'My Computer' and you can drag-n-drop files from one drive to another.

Message quoted 1 times

Reply to rwpritchett

You could theoretically run both hard drives internally which would remove the (assumed USB) USB bottleneck... especially the bottleneck from transferring from one USB drive to another. But that could turn into a bit of an ordeal and unless you are quick with swapping computer hardware probably wouldn't be worth the time invested. Other than that, just set up the transfer and go find something else to do for a few hours.

-mcg

Reply to MrCommunistGen

rwpritchett wrote :

You'll need to tell us what interfaces the external hard drives have. There's eSATA, firewire, and USB hookups. eSATA is the fastest, but the most common connection is USB.

One is firewire and the other is USB.

Quote :

...then just copy directly from one to the other.

Only way I know how to copy is, highlight the selection, right click, copy and paste. Since this is a large drive, how can I select the entire drive to copy? or do I have to manually select few songs to copy and then paste and repeat this process?

Reply to new2toms

highlight everything you want to copy, then press ctrl + c. Then go to the folder you want to paste in and press ctrl + v.

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Reply to boonality

crtl a will select everything then right click and select copy.

You own all of those songs right? :non:

Reply to roadrunner197069

The best connections are esata>firewire>usb.

Just connect the fastest one the drives supports to your computer then select the files and copy them to the new drive.

If you have the space on your computer i would recommend going from 1st drive to computer, from computer to second drive.

Also don't copy everything at once. if there is a courrupt file it may cause the copy to mess up in the middle. do a few directories at a time.

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Reply to predaking

predaking wrote :

...If you have the space on your computer i would recommend going from 1st drive to computer, from computer to second drive.

Also don't copy everything at once. if there is a courrupt file it may cause the copy to mess up in the middle. do a few directories at a time.

Thank you for your suggestions. I don't have enough space on my computer to copy all and then transfer to second drive. Copying few directories at a time is a good idea.

Reply to new2toms

I would definitely not use copy and paste, or drag and drop. I have tried this and with individual files, no problem, but with large amounts of data, as you are talking about, you will end up with problems, including not copying long file names, not copying files with non-standard letters, getting bad sectors on the destination drive, and bad clusters in the files themselves.

The method I understand that is best, is to back-up the source drive, then restore it to the new drive. This may need a third drive (to temporarily host the back up) or may not, depends on the back up software you use.

XP and Vista have built in back up, and there are many other versions on the market - some offering 30 day trials.

Hope this is helpful

Reply to Anonymous

Using USB it'll take you probably 6-7 hours to transfer all those files.

Message quoted 1 times

Reply to astrallite

astrallite wrote :

Using USB it'll take you probably 6-7 hours to transfer all those files.

You are correct sir!

Reply to thanos

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