How to copy over all the files in a computer

[jay santos]

My family computer is dead, and I want to make sure we don't lose any picture or movie files. There's been ten years of history of transferring from one computer to another, backups, etc, and the files I need are in tons of different folders throughout the computer. I have all kinds of system files, application files, corrupted files, etc that won't copy over. How can I do a mass copy, without starting over every time it trips up with a file that won't copy?

[mtnbiker]

You put the old drive into a new computer? You could just leave the drive in there. Otherwise, you can just copy directory by directory, so you only keep the stuff you really know you want or need. I don't know if there's a good way to just copy all your stuff in one command and leave out any system files.

[doctorcoug]

Above...and, start using a service like dropbox.

[DapperDan]

I haven't used it myself but Teracopy might work for you.

Error recovery
In case of a copy error, TeraCopy will try several times to recover and, in the worse case scenario, will simply skip the file, not terminating the entire transfer.

http://codesector.com/teracopy

[BigPiney]

I haven't used it myself but Teracopy might work for you.



http://codesector.com/teracopy

Teracopy is awesome. I put it on all my computers. Don't know if it will help in this case, but I do recommend it for your normal file transferring needs.

[Non Sequitur]

I use a freeware program called syncback. You designate the directory structures that you want to copy, and it syncs the files it can and skips and logs the ones that it can't. I setup a schedule that runs every night that syncs my "documents and settings" directory to a secondary internal drive on my laptop.