Almost everybody moves the Documents folder, sees their files sitting there on the new machine, and calls it done. Then a month later they go looking for something, a tax return, a batch of photos, the letter they wrote last spring, and it isn't there. It's still on a computer they gave away.

The move wasn't careless. It was incomplete, and it was incomplete because your files aren't in one place. They're scattered across five or six locations, some of them actually in invisible hidden directories.

Where your stuff is

Start with the obvious three:
Documents, Desktop, and Downloads. Most of your files end up here, and Downloads is the one most overlooked, even though half the things you ever saved off an email or a website landed there.

Then Pictures, which on most machines is also where your phone dumps photos when you plug it in.

ANd those hidden ones? Programs like to save your work where it is convenient for them. Quicken files, a QuickBooks company file, saved games, the folder your scanner software invented, an old Outlook data file. These are usually not in Documents, and they get left behind because you don't think to look for them.

And then the cloud folder, OneDrive or iCloud or Google Drive or Dropbox, which looks like a folder on your computer but isn't really, and I'll come back to why that matters.

Before you move anything, open the old machine and look in each of those spots. Ten minutes of looking now saves you pain later. If you want the plain-English version of what those first folders are even for, I wrote that up in Desktop, Documents, Downloads: what they're for.

The three ways to move them

There are really only three ways to get files from the old computer to the new one, and they're not equal.

An external drive is the one I trust most. Copy everything onto a USB drive, plug it into the new machine, copy it off. It's slow and it's manual, but you can see it happen and you end up with a spare copy on the drive. That's a backup you didn't have before.

A direct PC-to-PC transfer is faster and it's what I do on the bench, either over the network or with the right cable and software. It moves everything at once, even the hard to find, hidden bits.

Cloud sync is the one people reach for and the one I want you to be careful with. Yes, if your files are in OneDrive or Google Drive, signing into the new machine pulls them down. Convenient. But sync is not a transfer, and it is not a backup.

Sync mirrors deletions too

Here's the problem. Sync keeps two computers looking identical. That's geat, until you delete something, thinking it is backed up by the sync.

If a file is in your cloud folder and you delete it on the new machine, it deletes off the old one and off the cloud. It doesn't keep the old copy safe. It makes everything match, including the mistakes. Empty the folder on one end and you've emptied it everywhere.

So sync is a fine way to carry files across if that's already how you work. It is not the thing that protects you while you move. That's what a backup is for, and it's why I keep telling people to make one before they touch anything. See how to back up your computer, no cloud needed. If the cloud folder itself confuses you, why files appear in multiple places clears it up.

Double check

You moved everything. Now check it, on the new machine, before the old one goes anywhere.

Open the folders. Count roughly. Open a few actual files, a photo, a document, a spreadsheet, and make sure they open and they're the real thing and not empty. Look specifically for the hidden stuff from earlier, the Quicken file, the scanned receipts, the odd folder on the D drive.

This takes fifteen minutes and you may identify that one thing that will trip you up later.

Keep the old machine around a couple of weeks after you're sure, too. It's free insurance, and about once a month somebody finds the one folder they missed.

None of this is hard. It's just more places than you'd think, and the whole thing goes wrong at the one folder you didn't know to check. If you'd rather not roll the dice on it, a PC-to-PC transfer is $200 and I make sure nothing gets left behind. Book a session and it's handled.

Mike, PCRescue | Portland, ME