Need to get everything off my laptop and fast...pictures, music, documents, etc.

My mom said to go to Carbonite (?) and I could upload everything to a "cloud". I'm so behind the times, I've heard of the cloud, but I'm not really sure what it is.

Can anybody point me in the right direction for the best way to take care of this?

Thanks in advance!!!

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I follow where my mind goes...

If you have a flashdrive, could use that as a backup.

Size of the hard drive? You can find a reasonable external hard drive at Best Buy for under $75. Sites like Carbonite charge for monthly usage and most the cloud services are right now cheap to lure customers in, then over time they will have huge price hikes as people become more dependent on them.

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I think I have way too many pics for a flashdrive. (?)
What happens to my itunes?

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I follow where my mind goes...

How do I find out what size it is?

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I follow where my mind goes...

Not sure about iTunes, about a couple months ago, I put a ton of pictures, seemed like 1000 on one and still had room for more stuff.

I just read what's going on over there, hope it's okay.

Go to "My Computer" right click on the "C drive" & click properties. Should tell you the size & # of files. Flash drives are pretty big now, & hold quite a bit of material.

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Second City Saint

Ok, thanks for the info. And thanks for the thoughts.

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I follow where my mind goes...

Ur welcome

149 gb...42.4 is "free"

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I follow where my mind goes...

Yeah, you can find a cheap external hard drive that is 250GB - 500 GB for less than 50 bucks. Then you can copy your files over.

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$60 drive from newegg:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100006670%2040000414&IsNodeId=1&Description=western%20digital&bop=And&Order=PRICE&PageSize=20

They usually come with backup software. If you don't know how to do this, just search the interwebs and there are a ton of tutorials.

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In terms of cloud storage, you could try Dropbox if you haven't already. They start you with a modest 2GB of free space that you could increase by paying, or by falling under one of these categories of Dropbox users: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-get-the-most-free-space-on-dropbox-box-skydrive-and-more-the-complete-guide/

I've found Dropbox useful for the pictures I take with my phone (instantly uploaded), and for Word documents.

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Successful calls:

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2013 CSFMB ROY

All your kitty porn belong to us. Chris Andersen situation unfolding at the Homer home? write 1's and 0's to the hard drive and then
copy a bunch of new data to it. repeat. do it again. Then go at it with a magnet and then a sledgehammer and then microwave it on "defrost" for 30 seconds and then drive to Nevada and throw it into a nuke disposable site or else....

Oh, and here is what the Cloud is. Cloud is the new way to harvest people's data efficiently. You are essentially putting your files onto a shared, secured server farm. Once the files are on there, your usage patterns are tracked heavily. For example, every time you take a picture, there is meta-data captured. All that stuff can then be harvested by companies that process the data for analytic purposes. Is your data any safer? Yes, somewhat. Will you ever lose your data? Sure, once you stop paying for it. And at some point you will. Why? Because the laws of diminishing returns apply to the Cloud. At some point, more and more people will use it and as we depend more and more on it, the costs will increase. Then people who don't really understand technology will not ask the question "is it really worth $20 a month to share up my data with a cloud service when I can just back it up to a hard drive at home?"

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Okay, you could interpret this as her mom just found HH's porn collection on her laptop and it will be deleted if she can't back it up right away, but I think more than likely she can wait a day or two.

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absolute fastest way is to pull the physical drive out of the laptop and then attach the laptop hard drive as an extra drive to a desktop machine.

at that point, you can likely copy the 100 GB in 2 to 5 minutes. and then you can sort out the wheat from the chaff at your leisure.

next fastest is going to be either via firewire or usb or, if you have gigabyte ethernet on your local network and another computer on that network
with sufficient hard drive space, "scp" or "winscp" over a gigabyte lan is both fast and reliable .

usb transfers tend toward slow and unreliable but it sounds like your best option at this juncture.

This. Pull the hard drive. Or just take to local pc guy (not Geek Squad if possible). Pay him $40 to back up data to flash or external hard drive.

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Do you have any other drive letters under the Hard Disk Drives section of My Computer? If so, what size are they?

If you want to be super cheap & you have the time, you can copy all your picture files to discs. But for all of that, I'd go w/ either the external hard drive or the flash drive.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6812232002

This is an option if you need to pull the drive out. It allows you to hook the hard drive up to this device and use it as a USB device. This actually works with IDE and SATA drives (both laptop and desktop drives). Cost of this option >$20 for USB hard drive reader and a tiny Phillips screwdriver for removing tiny laptop screws if you don't have one.

Another option not mentioned here is to share files over your network by putting the laptop in the same workgroup/network as the desktop. Typically you run a network setup wizard and name your workgroup on both computers. Then, you share the files you want to copy in the shared folder and then you can pull them off from the shared folder on the second computer. To speed this process sometimes you share the root of the drive. You can this over wifi on your network. You know it's working when you go to My Network Places and you can see the one computer from the other one. Cost of this option: Free

The last option is to do the same thing as above, but with a crossover Ethernet cable. This only works with a crossover cable, which is a special type of Ethernet cord. Regular Ethernet cords do not work. A crossover cable has a little tag on it that says it's a crossover cord. The process is similar. You connect both ends of the cords to the Ethernet jack on the laptop and the desktop. They have to be within a cord's reach of each other. You set up a wired network that is not over the Internet. Typically you have to set a static IP for each one with something along the lines of 192.168.0.1 for one computer and 192.168.0.2 and sometimes you have to put the static IP for the gateway as being the other computer. Cost of this option >$10 for Ethernet cord.

All of these options require enough space on the 2nd hard drive. Obviously an external hard drive is another option. Firewire is faster, but not all computers have it. To do that you would need a Firewire jack on both the external hard drive and the laptop. Could require purchasing a PCMIA firewire for laptop and PCI card for desktop. If getting a USB only drive I would recommend something like a My Passport from Western Digital. It's less than $100 for 1 TB and even less for 500 GB.

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To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

Buy a toaster and a new hard drive for the laptop. Pay to have someone install the operating system and drivers on the new drive and to drop it into the laptop. You keep the old drive using it in the toaster. That way you do not need to worry about someone recovering your old files.

I would not do a backup. I would jus copy the specific files you need to an external drive. Better in case your new computer doesn't have the same OS, etc. This would not backup any applications or settings, though. Sometimes it's better to start fresh anyway.

This is an odd description of the cloud. For one, the location meta data thing can be turned off on your device. That doesn't really have to do with the cloud, that meta data is stored on the file... Whether its stored on your hard drive or in the cloud.

And most companies aren't identifying you if they even are tracking the Analytics. So it doesn't really affect you in any way.


Many other issues with only backing your stuff up at home. I've had my beautiful bride not properly eject a drive that was backing up a computer, and it cost me hundreds of dollars to get my data back. If you're storing in the cloud, they have the redundancy and backups to make sure that doesn't happen. I strongly prefer to have my pictures backed up in the cloud. God forbid a house fire, or even my kids messing up the hard drive beyond repair would really really suck.


Everyone uses the cloud, whether its gmail, Facebook, etc. Nothing to really be afraid of.

Thank you all for your responses. i will have to read them later...I just got home and he took my dog. That's all I had left that meant anything to me. Right now I just can't see how I'm going to live without her.

I promise to catch up and probably have more questions later.

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I follow where my mind goes...

That's stupid advice. If you want to keep the drive you can make it an external drive by buying an enclosure for it (usually under $20). Then it could be attached to another computer with a USB cord. If you are worried about people getting stuff off the drive pop in a CD of DBAN (Darick's Boot and Nuke) and run it on your laptop. It will take a few hours, but when you are finished no one will be able to get any of the files off the drive. Don't run that on your laptop unless you absolutely want to destroy all remnants of the files.

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To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

What a fucking dickhead. Sorry to hear that, HH.

You need to go & get her back. Stand up to the motherfucker. If you need assistance, give KS his address.

That is some pussy ass bullshit.

Dude needs to be dealt with.

Sorry HH.

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I don't think RNM would like that.

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