I recently bought a new computer. I saved the files from my old computer onto a DVD and they’re on my new computer in an “Old Files” folder.
Is there any way that I can have them sorted into my new “My Documents/My Pictures/My Music” etc. without having to drag drop them one at a time? When I drag “My Documents” from the old file into the new “My Documents” file it drops them fine but in an “Old Files” folder, while what I want to do is drop them in such a way that when I bring up Word 2007 all of the old files are already on there, or my 2004 pics and folders are automatically sorted under my new My Pictures with the ones I have on this computer.
I have a feeling that if this is possible it’s so simple that I’m going to feel frightfully stupid, but I’ll ask anyway.
Hunh? If you put files in a directory, they stay in that directory. If you want them somewhere else you have to say where you want them. You can copy groups at a time by looping round them with the mouse and transferring the group ‘lassooed’ to a new directory. If they have some part of the name in common, giving that a ‘wildcard’ on command line (though in Windows wildcards are severely restricted) copy has the same effect. Otherwise, the situation is exactly the same as if you clear a whole pack of shelves into a suitcase and want what is in there to magically sort itself out into a new deck of shelves. You would not expect that, so why expect a computer to guess what you have not told it?
It is a thought that perhaps a filing system could be arranged where instead of working down from groups holding subordinate groups, that would all be theoretical and each file list groups that it belongs to. But you would still need an index (which is what a directory really is) to locate files within groupings. That would allow a file to appear in several directories at once, which can be done at present but only through a linking file pointing to it in every other directory except the one the file actually resides in. (I’m not sure whether Windows-DOS can do this).
I think there are some backup systems that work in that kind of way but only for benefit of their equivalent restoration program.
Microsoft actually makes a tool for this called the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard. Basically, you run it on the old machine, and it creates an archive of My Documents and various other stuff (like Explorer settings and IE settings, desktop background, blah, blah blah), and then you take this archive to the new machine and run the transfer wizard again, at which point it asks you to point it that that archive, and it puts all the files on the new machine.
The catch is that the wizard will ask you some questions about how you want to transfer the archive, and the default option is, if I recall, something dumb like “split the archive onto 657 floppy disks.” If you have a portable drive (e.g. a thumb drive or external hard disk) that’s big enough, you can tell it to put the files there, and if the two machines are networked and you’re savvy enough to set up a “shared folder” then you can tell it to save the file in the shared folder so you can access it from the other machine.
I have used this several times for friends that wanted to transfer files and it works reasonably well. I can never remember exactly where to find it, so I go to the Help and Support Center and type “files and settings transfer wizard” and go from there.
ETA: one thing to note is that the old machine should have all Windows Updates applied before running it. At one point, they had a bug with an old version of the wizard that caused it to fail when trying to use the archive on the new machine. A year or two ago, there was an update that fixed this bug. If all your updates are installed, you should be fine.
If you took files that were in separate folders like MyMusic, MyDocuments, MyPictures, etc. and copied them all to one big folder on your DVD called OldFiles, then you’re stuck. You mixed tem all up in one folder, and lost the original locations when you did that.
You now have 3 options:
move them individually, one by one, into the appropriate Music, Documents, Pictures, etc. folders on your new computer.
find some patterns in the names, extensions, sizes, etc. that allow you to pick out groups that are all music, documents, pictures and then move them by groups into the appropriate folders. Like all *.doc files go to your documents folder, *.png goes to your picures folder, etc. When that’s all done, the remaining files will have to be moved one-by-one into the appropriate folders.
if you still have access to your old computer, get another DVD and copy them again, this time making sure to keep your music, documents, pictures, etc. in separate folders on the DVD. (This is probably by far the easiest way to do it.)
It won’t necessarily account for ALL the files in your mixed folder, but I’d start by:
Change the folder view so you can see the file extensions.
Sort the folder by TYPE (IE, doc, txt, jpg, gif, bmp, mp3, whatever), this is a standard sort.
Select all the DOC and TXT, drag them to My Documemts
Select all the MP3, WMA, etc, drag them to My Music
Select all the JPG, BMP, GIF. etc, drag them to My Pictures.
There shouldn’t be a whole lot left after the obvious ones are done.
I know, dumb brute force method, but it will work and you don’t have to know much to do it.
I don’t think this is exactly what happened, it doesn’t make sense, I think maybe you are a bit confused about what you did.
In any case, try opening the old “My Documents” folder, selecting everything, and choosing edit->copy. Then open the new “My Documents” folder and select edit->paste. There’s no reason why this shouldn’t work.
edit: others are assuming you have all of your files mixed together in a single directory. Based on your OP I don’t think this is what happened, so I wouldn’t follow their suggestions.
You download it to your computer and it’s like having a mini search engine for your hard drive. You can catalog documents, music, pictures, emails, whatever and it finds them lightning fast. It’s a lot faster than the inbuilt Search function of Windows.