Hi. I have never done this before, so any help would be appreciated. I bought a ‘My Passport’ from Bestbuy so I could transfer my files from one laptop to another (the one laptop is dying so I need to transfer).
I initially setup a backup on my old laptop, and assumed that I could just plug into the new laptop and it would allow me to restore the files onto that, but it doesn’t seem to be that easy.
I don’t have anything fancy on my old laptop, the usual pics, QuickBooks files, PDFs, Office files, ITunes, and of course tons of pics.
It all depends on which backup option or program you used to backup the original computer.
Also, if the backup was done correctly, it should be accessible when you access the drive through File Explorer.
I have the same question as Jim. I am trying to move data files over to a new laptop. I am very non technical. I can see the WD drive on my new laptop. What do I do next? I don’t want to copy everything. Just the data files.
Once you access your drive through File Explorer, you will se a folder named “WDSmartWare.swstor”, once you access this folder, do the following:
Click on (the name of your computer) > (A folder with several numbers) > Volume > Users > (select your user), and finally you should find your backup in categorized folders.
Did you ever figure out how to transfer files with your My Passport from
your old laptop to your new laptop? I have a similar issue with transferring
between my old desktop running vista and a new desktop running
Windows 10. The My Passport is running good backing up file on the
old desktop. Not sure how to do the file transfer? Do I have to put the new
desktop on my network so it can see the My Passport on the old desktop?
I don’t know enough about WD backup but from what I have seen it has no capability for making a disk image.
There’s a difference between a backup and a disk image. A backup stores files relative to an existing operating system. If the restore can’t find that system it can’t restore.
I suggest you make a disk image of your old laptop hard drive. If you’re using Win 7 it’s easy. The stock backup on W7 gives you the option to make a disk image. Then you can transfer the system on the old laptop directly to your new laptop using W7 restore.
Once the system is tranfered you should be able to use the WD restore.
If your OS is before W7 the backup has no disk image capabilities. I suggest you get a free utility like Comodo backup. It is the ability to make a disk image.
If you had a backup made with Win 7 you may be able to use the Win 10 restore to restore that backup. However, I doubt that Win 10 can restore files from a WD backup.
Western Digital needs to become aware of that. There’s no point providing a backup utility geared at WD drives when the market today required backup programs that can make a disk image.
Mind you, a disk image won’t help if it is made for Win 7 and you want to restore to Win 10. The restore would write all over the W10 installation.
To summarize, if the old laptop is running a different OS than the new laptop there’s no way to transfer data and files easily. Data files can be transferred once you install the related application onto a newer OS.
One solution if the old laptop was running Win 7 would be to make a disk image of the old laptop drive using W7 backup. Then you’d restore the image onto the new laptop which would then be running W7. If you had a W10 installation disk you could then upgrade to W10.
You have to be careful. Most laptops come with a hidden partition that contains their related OS files. Using computer management in Windows you can unhide that partition to see what’s on there. However, if you keep it hidden you can usually restore a disk image from another laptop on drive C:
Alternately, you could upgrade your old laptop to W10 then make a disk image. You could restore that Image onto a new laptop.
This gets messy since most new laptops might come with W10 pre-installed. Since it’s a brand new install there’s no loss in deleting it or restoring a disk image from an old laptop over top of it. Might be better to format the drive first then do the disk image restore.
Gets even messier. Many modern drives don’t use stock formatting. You need to find out first what kind of formatting is used. There are ways to convert between the formatting styles and it’s not that hard if you’re willing to do some research.
Thank you, Feraqui! That helped a lot! I manually transferred the main backed up files, Now I need to dissociate OneDrive from the folders. If you or anyone knows how, I will really appreciate it!
