What's the safest way to restore data from an external hard drive?

[sancco]

Say my internal hard drive died and I had to restore all my data from an external hard drive, what's the best way to do so? I'm thinking if I just try to copy it all back to a new internal hard drive, I might put the external hard drive at risk of overheating or something. I would be worried I might lose my backup and only remaining copy of my data in the process of restoring.

 

[popatim]

Place a house fan blowing on it (the external) and start by copy/pasting your most important data first.