Windows 10: Moving files from hard drive to another - How to prevent duplicates?

I need to move files (mostly pictures and videos) from an hard drive pulled from an older Windows 7 machine to a backup external drive (using Windows 10)

There are some files on the pulled HDD that are also on the backup drive, but they are all mixed, so I can't just copy them into the new drive and get the prompt where Windows asks me what to do - thus I have to search my self for duplicates

But is there a less painstaking work I can do? Using some advanced commands? (The pulled drive is a complete Windows 7 installation drive, so not just the photos and videos, but everything, including Windows, C:/, Program Files etc..)

Ty!

:)

 

Transfering files from SSD to Hardrive

The fact that one is an SSD and the other is a hard drive is irrelevant. The real issue is how to move files from one drive to another, regardless of what kind of drives they are.

And the answer is the same, even if you wanted to move files on a single drive, from one folder to another: drag-and-drop or cut-and-paste.

 

recovering files and transferring them to another internal hard drive

Operating System Windows 10 professional version 1607 Build (14393.222)

Operating system is on an internal hard drive (534 GB free of 683 GB)

The computer has 32 GB flash cache.

I think the operating system has become corrupt even though no corruption is found or fixed with scannow or restorehealth.

The computer once had windows 7 professional and it had upgrade/downgrade rights and was upgraded to windows 10 professional.

There is an empty bay for an additional internal hard drive on this computer.

Windows easy transfer was once an option to transfer files from one computer to another but disappeared for windows 10. There is a company selling a product to replace windows easy transfer.

What are the options other than the above to move files from this internal hard drive to another internal hard drive on another computer? Also I had never on my own recovered files on a failed drive. How do you find all of the appropriate files so that
you don't miss important files and how do you not transfer unneeded files that would take up hard drive space?

With the internal hard drive not being found by windows 10 professional in another computer I was unable to move the internal hard drive with the potentially corrupt os into the empty bay of another computer. Now I am considering placing an empty 1 TB internal
hard drive into the empty bay of the computer with the potentially corrupt windows 10 operating system. If this computer recognizes the two internal hard drives how would you move all appropriate files from one drive to the other?

Please indicate how to move files from one drive to another or one computer to another. I don't have a hardware enclosure or a cable that moves files.

Please indicate how to find the appropriate files that need to be moved.

Please indicate how to decide which files not to move.

Please indicate which steps to make before formatting or sanitizing the internal hard drive with the potentially corrupt os.

In addition to the 1Tb internal hard drive that is empty I also have an external 32 Gb flash drive that has on it windows 10 professional (setup.exe). It has 28.5 GB free of 31.9 Gb.

Once the appropriate files are recovered to the empty internal hard drive how would you then install the windows 10 operating system onto the internal hard drive? Would you have to install the operating system first onto the internal hard drive? If so
how would you do that? I have recovery media for windows 7 pro and windows 10 pro. If you need to install the os first how would you do this with the potentially corrupt os on the internal hard drive with important files and an empty internal hard drive?
Would it have to be a double transfer (transfer important files from the internal hard drive that has a potentially corrupt os to an empty internal hard drive then transfer the files back to another internal hard drive that already has on it the os) of files?

 

Hi there

Try Grsync for Windows -- it's a GUI port of the Linux rsync program.

More Reasons Why Grsync Is An Awesome Syncing Tool [Cross-Platform]

Among things it does nicely is copy files from Dir A to Dir B IF they DON'T exist in B.

Read documentation though --usually for what you want is check skip existing but loads of other options.





Cheers
jimbo

 

Looks great, I'll give it a try and tell you how it did!

**Addition: If I have 2 copies of the same file, but with different names (example picture1.jpeg and picture2.jpeg, but they are indentical), is there a way for Windows/Other software to still recognize the duplicate?

 

There are plenty of programs that will do this. You could see here The Best Duplicate File Finder for Windows

Another way to copy all of your pictures/videos from one drive to another is to use the copy command. For example this powershell command will copy all .mp4 and .mkv found anywhere on D drive to a directory called "E:\Videos" if they don't already exist Code: Get-ChildItem "D:\" -recurse -include @("*.mp4","*.mkv") | ` Foreach-Object { if (-not (Test-Path ("E:\Videos\"+$_.name))) { ` Copy-Item $_.fullname -destination "E:\Videos\"}}[/quote] You may or may not find it easier than using a program depending whether you want to keep old folder hierarchy I guess but might be handy if you don't know where the originals are and wanted to consolidate them.

 

Thank you lx07, I don't care about older hierarchy, so this command may be useful, right now I can't test any of your methods, but still, in the command, I need to create a new drive E:/? or the command will create E:/ and the folder Videos?

(I dont care if the new folder will be in an existing drive, as long as it's on the external hard drive)

 

When you plug in your 2 drives (the old 7 one and the backup one) Windows will give them drive letters. Most likely they will be D and E but they could be E and F if you have a CD drive. Really they could be any letter.

You'd have to change the command above to copy from the drive with 7 on (D in my example) to your backup (E in my example) and change /Videos to a directory that exists that you want to copy them to).

You can then run it again and change the bit that selects ".mp4" and ".mkv" to ".jpg" and whatever other format your pictures are to get all your pictures and copy them to a directory called E:\Pictures for example.

 

Hi,

You need to replace the code (path) marked in red with whatever corresponds to your actual drive letters and destination folder.
Oh, and it should E:\ "back slash" btw.

Cheers, *Wink

 

You may or may not find it easier than using a program depending whether you want to keep old folder hierarchy I guess but might be handy if you don't know where the originals are and wanted to consolidate them.[/quote] I just checked your link out of curiosity and found out my favorite duplicate file finding program dupeGuru is no longer supported for Windows. I haven't used it in awhile so I'll check later to see if it still works in Windows 10 Pro RTM and Windows 10 Pro Insider.

 

You wait until you get a message stating that there are duplicates and choose either to ignor and not copy or to replace.

There are scripts out there that run a macro that will look for oldest vs newest, then replace the oldest.