How to Move Everything from an Old PC to a New PC

i'm in our computer room today and the lighting is not that great but that's okay because today i'm doing a tutorial for anyone who has built a new pc and has an old pc and wants to take the stuff on the old pc and move it to the new pc how should you go about doing that and what are my recommendations just a little over a month ago i built a brand new pc for my lovely wife diana it's still out in the garage and i've been itching to move it in here and swap her old pc which was named hotbox which has gone through a few different variations over the years and i'll post the link to some of those videos in the description if you're interested but how do you take everything from an existing pc and move it to a new pc to keep things simple i have boiled it down to three steps excellent so the three things you're going to need to copy from your old system to the new system are one your personal data your personal files to your programs and three your program settings or other files that those programs might rely on the tools you'll need in order to do this are your old pc and your new pc and i'm assuming that both of those are functional up and running windows is installed and it's up to date then you will need some sort of medium for transferring the data an external usb flash drive or ssd or other external drive is ideal and you might need more storage on that depending on how much data you have to back up off of your old system and then you'll want an internet connection to download programs or other files that you might need and of course to come back and reference this video and then once you're done and everything has gone so smoothly you can come back to this video and hit the thumbs up button or subscribe to my channel if you want to see more tech videos and tutorials before you start copying files you should double check your existing computer's configuration specifically the storage configuration because if you have an old pc and a new pc and they both function independent of one another then all you're really concerned about is the data on the old pc and where that data is located is going to be on your storage drives you're going to have at least one storage drive and if you're running windows windows 7 or 10 or 11 is probably most likely right now then it's probably labeled as local disk and it's probably your c drive now if you've just got that c drive it simplifies things a little bit i have a second one terabyte ssd on this system but i know all that's on there right now is this games folder and then i'm capturing my obs screen cap for making this video on that drive as well one nice thing about having a secondary drive especially if it's one that has a lot of space is you can just copy stuff directly to that drive and physically remove the drive from your old system and then just install it in your new system and keep using things as is that is what my plan is for today so i'm just making a folder in here for backing all this stuff up called march 2022 backup and note that if i was using an external drive or an ssd and i had plugged it into the system it would be popping up as another drive just like this so functionally from what you guys are seeing it's going to be the same as if you were using an external beyond that everything else you can see as far as the data represented on the system is stored on this c drive that includes everything that might be on the desktop and that also includes all these system folders like the documents folder the downloads folder music pictures and videos if you use those one thing you might want to double check for all these folders is if you right click them and go to properties you can go to location this location can actually be remapped although someone would have have to have done that with your pc so if someone else set up your system or you're just not sure double check to make sure these locations are on the c drive and that will allow you to make sure that you don't have any files that are on another drive that's on the system that you're forgetting to back up with that said now that we have a drive to backup to and we've made a little backup folder here we can start copying the first thing which is going to be personal data and that means files that are unique to you typically things that are irreplaceable like personal photos you should always ideally have already backed up in more than one location i always try to copy photos to at least an external drive if not cloud storage somewhere or even better like a family member's house that you share data with that you can sync back and forth to so you both have backups in both locations but these are files that you cannot just redownload from the internet so let's back those up first and since this is not my pc it's my wife's pc i'm not going to do a whole lot of organization for her i'll leave that up to her in the future so in the backup folder i'll make a folder for desktop one for downloads one for pictures and so on and then we can just start copying okay i am at least going to organize photos but do bear in mind if you're doing what i'm doing and dragging and dropping there's two ways to do it you can just drag and drop and if you drag and drop with a left click from one drive to a different drive it will copy from one drive to the other and it will leave the files on the original drive you can also right click and drag over like this and here you can choose move and i find that this helps me keep track of the backup process although it should be noted that this does mean we're still only keeping these files in one location so i'm only doing this because i know these files are backed up elsewhere already i'll just choose move but this means that it's going to pull it off of the desktop and into that folder and then i know oh well it's not on the desktop anymore so i've copied that and backed it up japan oh see there's some files that you're they're just too precious to leave behind obviously oh some more pictures from the desktop move all right and now our desktop folder is empty although if we look at the desktop we can see there's still stuff on the desktop these are all shortcuts if you're not familiar with shortcuts they have a little arrow on them and that's not a real file it's just a shortcut it's a representation of where a file is elsewhere on the pc so these you can typically just trash i'm gonna leave that one there as a reminder so we've cleared off the desktop and we'd also of course want to look at pictures and videos and this is where usually most of your personal data files would be stored we have network attached storage the free nas build that i have built and rebuilt a few different times so most of the photos that we copy off of phones or cameras we copy over to that for a little bit more secure long term backup storage which is why the videos folder and the pictures folders on this computer are pretty much empty from there you'll definitely want to check out the documents folder and here's where also lots of different programs like to save stuff so feel free to check individual folders a lot of them you know might just be empty and not something you need to copy but if you play video games the video game will often create a folder in the documents folder to store game configuration options or backup saves my wife is a huge fan of overwatch so this folder is definitely something that we should be backing up if you're at all uncertain it's okay to just grab the entire documents folder and copy it over and worry about that later if you need to focus on getting the transfer done of course if you're like me you've maybe tried that before and then you have various folders in different places of like this backup that was done two years ago and this one from four years ago and you've never really quite gone through and sorted those all out but at least the data was there if you might have needed it we also have a downloads folder the downloads folder can often be super crowded with a bunch of different stuff and here is where you might have more personal files if they weren't moved from the downloads folder somewhere else but most browsers like edge firefox and chrome default to downloading stuff to the downloads folder so it is worth taking a look at fortunately all the files in here are installers so this is the chrome installer this is the nzxt cam installer steam rocket swarm the battle.net installer all of these can be redownloaded from the internet and all of these also likely have updated installers that would be better to download from the internet anyway so i'm just going to delete them so now we have combed through looking for personal files that we need to back up over the desktop pictures and videos folder the documents folder music is another thing that's replaceable to some extent online so you can re-download mp3 files and stuff like that that said not everyone wants to do that so if you have a music collection copy that over too and then there is the 3d objects folder which i still don't understand what it is or why it's there so there's it's empty so i'm not going to bother with it so we should now be just about done with step one copying all of our personal data off of the old system but this is something that you really want to double check and make absolutely sure you've been as thorough as possible with so it may or may not be worth your while to go directly into the c drive and dig through some of these folders to see if there's anything else there that you might need to copy one final tip before i move on if you're trying to dig up more stuff or if you feel like there's more stuff on your drive and you're not able to find it winder stat is a little application that you can download and run and i'm not running it directly right now but basically you run it it comes through the entire drive and then it gives you a visual representation of everything that's on the drive and it's also color coded so extremely large blocks you can click on and be like what's taking up that much data and it will tell you oh this is a system file or like all these little green files are mp3s so in this way you can pick out certain files like especially if you have big video files that might be taking up a lot of space but you can't locate them with step one done though we can move on to step two and step two is to back up your programs now programs are different than personal files because you don't necessarily need to copy the programs off of your old computer and onto your new computer what is often better is to just download the programs from the internet directly onto your new computer to make sure you have the most up-to-date versions and also because programs installed on your old computer aren't often easy to just drag and drop and copy you often need an installer to install a program and you might not still have those there's a couple ways to look at what programs are currently installed one is to go back to your c drive and just look through your program files folders some programs do not install there but almost every single one should but that can get a little confusing because there might be system folders in there or other confusing things so the better thing to do in my opinion is to go to the add or remove programs part of the control panel i guess if you don't want to search for it you can go to settings and it's under apps and apps and features and here you have a list of installed programs i've copied this list as simply as just doing a screen grab taking a picture with my phone windows plus print screen will take a screenshot of what you're currently looking at just remember that that screenshot will then appear in your pictures folder so you'll want to copy that to your backup drive or you could even use pencil and paper technology to just copy down or write down uh the applications that you know you still want again keep in mind you do not need an exhaustive list here some apps like candy crush soda saga are just default installed by windows and shouldn't even be there in the first place so it really helps if it's your computer to just reality check and make sure that the apps you're writing down are the ones that you actually use on a regular basis or if you're doing this transfers for somebody else this is a good time to sit them down and be like what do you actually use on your computer what programs do you launch all the time and that way you can run down the list and make sure you don't miss anything if you do happen to be on a metered internet connection or you're concerned about redownloading a bunch of data or how much time it might take then it might also be worth your while to double check that downloads folder like i showed you earlier there might be install packages there that were downloaded previously that you could just copy and that might save you a little bit of time just remember that if you try to go into like the program files folder you typically cannot just drag and drop a whole folder from the program files folder into your backup and then onto your new pc because like i said you often need to run an installer to install a program rather than just having the folder that's not always the case though and if you have a lot of games installed on your system then here is where it really might be worth your while to back stuff up rather than redownloading it for example the overwatch installation on this computer is about 20 gigs and you know that's going to take some time to redownload depending on your internet speed so with a lot of games you can drag and drop and copy the bulk data files of the game and then depending on the launcher you're using whether it's steam or the battle.net launcher there are various ways to get the launcher on your new system to recognize the game that's been copied over and there's a really good written article on that that i will also link in the description for anyone who's copying stuff over that said for steam specifically if you go into the steam folder there should be a steam apps folder i originally set up steam to download games to the savage one terabyte drive on here but in the steam apps folder there is a common folder and then that will be where all the individual folders for each game are so if you copy those over then you can plop them onto the new system in the proper folder location and then using the article linked in the description it'll walk you through the steps for getting steam to recognize those and then not having to re-download them and that's all for the second step so now we can move on to the third step which is copying program data and this is sort of a catch-all category for extra stuff that programs might need that you might not know that you need in order for the program to work the way it did in the past let me give you an example to clarify if you have a bunch of shortcuts or bookmarks saved on your browser well yes with a lot of browsers you can log into the browser and it will store that in the cloud like chrome will do that so keeping in mind that if your browser has the ability for you to log in and store that stuff in the cloud then you can back it up that way but you can also manually back it up this is how you do it in chrome it's pretty similar in firefox and other browsers we're going to click on the three dots and go over to our bookmark manager and then click on these three dots and go to export bookmarks and we've gone ahead and saved these to our backup drive and the other part of backing up files that some programs you use might be reliance on i've kind of already showed you but just to reiterate if you go back over to your documents folder there will likely be folders here that have unique files configuration files or otherwise that tie into the programs that you use so that's something that you hopefully have already backed up in that step but if you didn't double check it now and make sure that for any of the programs that you use regularly there's nothing there that you need to copy and backup as well and that should just about cover you but once again if you go over the list of programs that you already made in step two you might want to double check those make sure you have no unique programs that might save data elsewhere on your drive that you need to copy or in particular keep an eye out for stuff like this a lot of printers have unique utilities that might be difficult to find sometimes especially if you're using something older we have a brother printer that works really great it's a network attached and everything like that but sometimes it's a little finicky if you don't install the utilities but that was the last thing on my list to talk about so at this point i should be able to pull the old pc out drop the new pc in where it was copy the stuff off of that drive onto the new system and get it set up to the point where when my wife comes back to use it it's pretty much the exact same as her old system was okay so i've placed the system where the system is supposed to go and as i mentioned in the build video for this the reason why i went with the flipped orientation is so you can actually see it from this side when the system is where it is here it's also much much much brighter than my pc right there and the free nas is in the middle and i do want to point out since there's you know cables over here various things have cluttered up the space since i did the original cable management video in here with the sit stand desks and everything but i want to take another pass at it and uh make things look a little bit more pristine in here and probably move the freenas down to the lower level although that is pretty close to the ground so i'll i'm gonna figure some stuff out i'd also like to get rid of the texture on the walls in here like we did out in the living room out there but i'm getting a little bit too far ahead of myself main point is look system boots up uh i should activate windows that'd be cool too and the drive from her old system is this uh hyperx savage one terabyte ssd i just popped it out of there i haven't even taken it off of the tray this is a sata to usb adapter status to usb 3.0 adapter actually specifically so these are really convenient these also work with the mechanical hard drives although i do believe the power requirement can vary on that but just going to plug that in there plug the other end into my conveniently accessible front panel usb 3. open folder to view files and there is all the stuff that we just backed up in case you're wondering this is a 42-inch 4k monitor that my wife uses and actually she's getting a little over this one it's only 60 hertz and she'd like to game in here again which is part of the reason why we're thinking about swapping out so stay tuned for a future video i'd like to do sort of a revamp of my wife's current setup to kind of go along with her super fancy pc that's over there now so if you guys have any suggestions for that i would love to hear them in the comment section of course and in the meantime just give me a few minutes here to copy this backup stuff to the new system [Music] i just copied the desktop folder to the desktop it's very very meta i guess i can't say meta anymore it's like desktop section i don't know my old windows 8 pro licenses are the gifts to keep on giving i've activated so many pcs with these right so at this point it's just a matter of kind of doing things in reverse order like i can go back to the bookmarks manager to import my bookmarks oh it looks like it just dropped them all into an imported folder that's that's cool well at least they're here and if she really wanted to she could just log back into chrome and with that i am mostly done uh there are still a few more things to do but uh let's reset the desktop background to what it was before and i just need to double check that programs list to reinstall any of the programs that are still needed and then of course once my wife actually gets home she can reality check and make sure there's nothing glaringly missing from this that she needs to set up as well she will need to slightly transition from windows 10 to windows 11. it's not too jarring i found it to be pretty simple to use once you get a hang of a few of the ui quirks and hopefully for you guys watching home you now have a better idea of how to transfer all your stuff from an old system to a new system and apart from the step-by-step stuff that i talked about today a lot of it boils down to having good practices in place for where you keep your stuff on your computer from the get-go so you know where things are when you need to go in and back them up and if you're comfortable with that and you're comfortable with the steps i walked you through in this video then it also gives you an extra layer of protection if your system is compromised if you need to wipe your windows installation reformat and reinstall windows then having these backup steps in place already means you can reset your system if you ever got a virus or malware or something along those lines but guys thank you so much for watching this video and as mentioned hit the like button if you enjoyed it and check the description for links to useful stuff like winter stat and some of the other things i mentioned today you can also find a link to my store down there at paul's hardware dot net where you can buy shirts mugs pint glasses and other high quality merchandise to help support my channel and get yourself some high quality merch at the same time and if you're not already subscribed maybe consider subscribing as well thanks again you guys and we'll see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Paul's Hardware

Views: 760,582

Keywords: computer, PC, PC gaming, personal computer, computer hardware, paulshardware, how to set up a new pc, transfer old pc to new pc, copy files from old computer, copy data from old computer, old pc to new pc, back up old computer, backup, copy, transfer, files, data, settings, games, folders, windows, windows 10, windows 11, windows 7, usb, external drive, windirstat

Id: id01_oBuNR4

Length: 17min 58sec (1078 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 09 2022