[Closed] Setting up a new computer - lets start this properly

I will just try synching the accounts as you suggest. It is mostly a load of old videos and photos that wouldn’t be fatal to lose.

I suppose if your end goal is to use cloud storage anyway, there's little practical difference between uploading from your old PC or physically moving the drive, copying to the new one and then uploading from there instead.

I have a way simpler process which removes all the challenges and worries from back ups.

Live for the moment in bliss with no future worries or concerns from the past. If everything you have is taken from you then you are simply free to choose what new to collect.

If you truly do not care* then you have the joy of a carefree existence.

*You also have a high probability of life changing accidents as caring about the consequences of actions are also of no relevance - at least if I am the case study for this upon which you focus.

Wait, if One Drive is a *backup* then this has to happen at the exact same time that your drive fails or your laptop is stolen etc.

I have many files backed up that are not on my workstation that I still may need at some point in the future. Photos being the main thing and they are the files that the majority of people I think care most about but the situation is the same for other files and documents too.

So the scenario is this. Over time you change phones, by a new computer, lose stuff etc. For person A their photos though are backed up on their hard drives. They are also backed up on OneDrive. They may not however be present on the new phone, new computer etc.

Person B only has their photos backed up on OneDrive.

Both lose their OneDrive account. Only one can get their photos back...

My solution for phone photos is to have my phone dump the photos to OneDrive and then OneDrive syncs back to my PC which then syncs to the external drives.

My sister has lost all her first child's early photos through exactly this scenario.

I use idrive cloud backup, its about 40 quid for 5tb. Took a few days for my initial backup, but that was a lot more data than was strictly needed, but would be more convenient than reobtaining from other sources.

Of course, but the basic calculation is still probability vs impact vs effort.

Also you cant' always rely on cloud storage, company I used to work for had stuff on rackspace and UKfast amongsts others, depending on how much the customer wanted to pay.

UKfast took themselves down a few years back, someone cut through a powerline during adjacent building work and it took the whole thing offline, not for long but long enough to cost thier customers £££££££

https://www.theregister.com/2017/12/12/pickaxe_cuts_through_cable_kos_ukfast_datacentre/

Now you'd think a 'datacenter' would have UPS battery arrays and deisel generators in the event of a power cut, the shitstorm that caused was so funny.

My sister is really quite upset that she has no photos of her child from birth to 18 months old and it could so easily have been avoided.

Setting up an external hard drive at home and have either Acronis or Aomei plod away completely invisibly in the background is as trivial as setting up OneDrive. The other big danger of OneDrive is, if you leave the default settings as they are, is that you have no local copy at all which is really stupid.

I remember a company building a 'secure' computer room which was bomb proof and had UPS etc. Unfortunately the power went down during a maintenance period and the automatic locks to the computer room were on the main building power and not the secure UPS. Even though they could get a safe, secure power supply to the room, they couldn't get in and had to just watch the batteries drain and the entire European computer system for their business die for about 14 hours until they could get the correct power to the correct places in the correct sequence.

Made more embarrassing as this was 2 days after the global unavailing of their uninterruptable solution.

It was called titan but from that day on it was referred to as Titanic for going down as it did

@WorldClassAccident - that is brilliant. Almost as good as the recent events of Facebook managing to lock itself down entirely for a number of days to the point staff couldn't even access their own buildings to start fixing shit 🙂

People have mentioned various 'automatic' backups. For me, at least one copy should be offline. If you get a malware infection and don't spot it, you'll be overwriting clean files with infected ones, similarly if ransomware locks up your system, it may find your backup and lock that.

The only exception I'd make for storage on slow drives apps on fast SSDs is for video editing. I like enough space on a SSD for source videos to a handful of video editing projects - I imagine it helps!!

Also a fan of keeping OS & data on separate partitions.

Timely opportunity to post the quarterly Argos offer for Microsoft / Office 365 that is on right now.

https://www.argos.co.uk/product/8837505

Also a fan of keeping OS & data on separate partitions.

That used to make a slight difference in the days of hard disks, but not any more I don't think.

I guess everyone has their own set of programs they add to a new installation.

I'd normally go:

Firefox
Classic Shell
Img Burn
Irfan View
7 zip (or winRAR)
Winamp
QbitTorrent
SLSKqt
VLC
Audacity
DB Poweramp
Handbrake
Karen's Replicator
SABnzdb
Python 3

Pretty subjective stuff...

Who wants a giggle at my expense?

Of the 343GB of data I had to transfer I have successfully transferred everything except one directory which I accidently deleted instead of copying.

Whoops!

Which directory?

"C:/Nicks Vids"

Any guesses what was in there?

Every video I have ever made and all the raw footage including three I was currently working on, including the one promised as part of the commission for a £1,000 painting I have nearly finished.

Balls!

On the bright side, the files I have managed to copy over take up almost no space at all.

Well I can't recover anything it seems. 11.4GB survived. I guess I can paste some photos together to make the video of the painting and call it artistic licence.

this is an excellent tool for recovering media

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

Thanks, but to be honest there is nothing I need that much or particularly care about.

Onward to new and better things

Also a fan of keeping OS & data on separate partitions.

Again, once good advice but now pointless.

Pretty subjective stuff…

Many of those things are useful but there's nothing there I'd add by default unless I needed them.

That's kinda how I feel about my data too. Though expect one day it'll catch me out :-/

Again, once good advice but now pointless.

Disclaimer: Linux user at home. Probably is pointless to non-tech Windows user, but handy for me if I want to re-install the OS or different OS.

I accidently deleted instead of copying

Are you -sure- you deleted it rather than accidentally moving it? Searched the drive(s) for a known filename?

Recycle Bin?

Try Recuva.

Also, something about backups. 😁

Hit some keys wrong while trying to type with a cast on. Some message about files being too big to reverse the operation that I ignored as I was in a rush to get dinner. Typical EBKAS*. No obvious remains of the files and life is too transient to care about the past.

*Error Between Keyboard And Seat

That would be great but might not work well as the old and new computer only have one keyboard, mouse and screen between them so I have to crawl under the desk and plug/unplug to switch between them, also my webcam died at the weekend.

You could use VNC or similar to connect to the old computer and drive it from the new one. No need for crawling.

Also you cant’ always rely on cloud storage

I still remember the great Gentoo wiki loss in the naughties. Rip

Setting up an external hard drive at home and have either Acronis or Aomei plod away completely invisibly in the background is as trivial as setting up OneDrive.

If one has a NAS enclosure from either Synology or QNAP they have apps that can back up the contents of oneDrive locally which should avoid the 30 day drop-off problem.

I still remember the great Gentoo wiki loss in the naughties.

Password Manager ! I use bitwarden because it's free and will sync on my devices no bother