Moving my files to a new PC

This is an introductory Data Migration article that might help you move files from one Windows PC to another. Something you might find you need to do when you buy a new PC.

Introduction

What do you mean by "Move"?

In the simplest form - to copy stuff from one PC to another. However you might also need to focus in actually removing files from the old one so that they are no longer accessible there. This can be important when you want to make sure that sensitive data can't fall into the wrong hands.

What do you mean by "My Files"

At its simplest level you might just need to move any documents, photos, videos and anything else that you have created and stored on the PC. However there are increasing layers of complexity here; you might also want to move applications that you have installed on the old PC to the new one. Going further you might also want to move the configuration and settings of those programs. At the most extreme level you might want the complete operating system and all its personalisation and settings to move as well.

How to

The next question is how to move stuff. There are many options, and each have advantages and disadvantages.

Sneakernet

Sneakernet is the informal term for moving stuff from one place to another using physical media like Portable hard disks, USB thumb drives, memory cards. The "network" in this case is the act of walking from one machine to another in your sneakers (aka trainers, shoes etc!).

Generally this is easy to do, and readily available. It can be fairly cheap, and It can also move huge amounts of data quickly and with ease (or in the words of renowned computer scientist Andrew Tanenbaum: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.")

However it does not always scale well as distances increase, or when you don't have easy physical access to one or more of the computers. It also tends to duplicate the copy operations - one copy to the media, then another from it.

Local area network (LAN)

Modern computers are usually connected to networks (wired or wifi), and already have the abilities to "share" information on the network so that it can be accessed by other computers. This can be fairly quick (especially if connected by gigabit ethernet), and can move large amounts of information without needing external storage devices, and multiple copy operations. It is also good when working on migration remotely (say helping someone else migrate files using remote access software)

How to

Before you can access data on one PC from another, you need to "share" a folder on the PC so that other networked PCs can find it. There are several ways to do this, but there is a quick and easy method that works well for granting access to your user profile using the command line. So open a command line (right click on the start button and select command line, or power shell or Terminal and select the option with administrator privileges). Then:

net share Source="C:\Users\TargetUser" /grant:Support,FULL 

icacls "C:\Users\TargetUser" /grant Support:(OI)(CI)F /T /C

The "net share" command will share the users folder on the the network, and the shared folder will be called "Source". Replace "C:\Users\TargetUser" with the path to your user profile folder, e.g, "C:\Users\John".

The "/grant:" specifies the name of a user on the existing PC that is allowing the access. In this case the example shows a user called "Support". That means that when you browse to the computer in the Network section of windows explorer on another PC, you will be promoted to enter the credentials of a user that has the permission to access this share. You would need to enter the username and password for the user name you used in the "net share" command. This allows you to migrate data on a LAN without giving access to the user's data to anyone that might want to snoop!

Most modern Windows PCs will have NTFS formatted disks - and these will also enforce access restrictions on files. The "icacls" command will iterate through the whole profile folder (it may take a few mins) for the user (again replace "C:\Users\TargetUser" with the actual user's profile folder name), and set the permissions so that the files can be accessed by the specified user (again replace "Support" with a valid user name on the machine sharing the files). Note some of the folders in the hidden "AppData" folder may belong to other system applications - and you may ge an error when icacls tries to set the permissions. In most cases these errors can be ignored.

Direct connection

In some cases you can physically plug one computer directly into another using a data transfer cable, and move files that way. On modern USB3 / Thunderbolt machines, this can be very quick. Note you may need special software to do it this way.

Via the internet

There are lots of options here:

Email

it can be as simple at attaching files you want to move to and email and sending it to yourself!

Cloud storage

There are also a multitude of cloud storage options (Google Drive, One Drive, Dropbox etc) that make synchronising collections of files with cloud storage and accessing them in multiple places very easy. These can be very convenient. Speed however can very greatly and will depend on how good your internet connection is. There may also be privacy, security and cost implications with file being possibly open to undesired access, or needing to pay for cloud storage space it you have lots of files to move.

Web services

There are many web services that allow data to be uploaded and "sent" places (e.g. wetransfer.com), again easy to use and convenient. Speed will depend on internet access speed, and there may be limitations on the amount of information you can move (many free services will allow at least a couple of GB to be moved this way)

VPN

A VPN (or Virtual Private Network) can allow two computers to connect to each other as if connected on the same LAN - allowing direct sharing and access of files in the same way they would on a LAN. Can be more complicated to setup, and might not be quick, but it does work at distance and scale, and has fewer security or privacy implications since your files are never stored on someone else's computer.

Physical drive transfer

Often overlooked, but moving a Solid State Drive (SSD) or Hard Disk Drive (HDD) from one computer to another can be a very quick and easy way to move lots of data. With smaller (i.e. 2.5" and M2) drives, these can usually be powered from a USB drive adaptor, and so connected to a computer quickly and easily just be plugging them into a USB socket.

What should I move

Your files

The simplest file migration will focus on moving all of your own files; so documents., spreadsheets, pictures videos etc. So let's start with those.

Where do I find them?

Unless you mess with the default file locations (or install MS OneDrive - we will come to that later), most user files will be in the C:\Users folder. Typically there will be a folder in that location for each user who has an account on the PC. So if your account was called Josh, you would expect to find a folder C:\Users\Josh. That is called your "Profile" folder, and it will be created automatically the fist time the account that owns it logs in. In this folder you will find more folders like Downloads, Documents, & Desktop. These folders are the default locations where downloads are save, any documents you save, and any files or folders that you placed on your desktop are stored.

Copying the Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Music, OneDrive, Pictures and Videos folders will copy most of your data.

Hidden stuff

There is another folder in your profile that can be useful as well, and this is called "AppData". However by default it is hidden. AppData stores data specific to individual applications and the are times were you can copy parts of this to help migrate data for an application. You can move into this folder either by unhiding it, or just clicking in the address bar of the window, and typing \AppData on the end of the file path.

In the AppData folder you will typically see three folders; Local, LocalLow, and Roaming. Most of the interesting stuff will be in the Roaming folder. For example the email application Thunderbird will have a folder here. If you copy that entire folder to the same place on your new machine before you run Thunderbird for the first time, it will migrate everything in one go. All you mail accounts, saved passwords, local folders message stores and even any message filters or searches you may have saved.

OneDrive

On the subject of hidden stuff, let's have a word about OneDrive. Normally when you install this it creates a folder in your profile called OneDrive. It then creates another set of Documents, Desktop etc folders in there and moves the files from their original folders into these. Finally it tell windows that the location of these folders has changed to the new location in the one drive folder, so that everything works like it did before, but the location of the files has been moved.

The first "gotcha" is that if you uninstall OneDrive it probably won't move stuff back how it used to be. So that can be a shock when it looks like your files have vanished!

To migrate stuff to a new PC with OneDrive, in theory all you need do is install OneDrive on the new PC, and sign into your OneDrive account. That should automatically restore the cloud copy of the data to the new machine. There are a couple of issues though - it can only restore what was actually backed up to the cloud - so any files that were not yet uploaded from the old machine won't get restored.

Also moving large amounts of files this way can be slow, and will use lots of internet data.

You can speed up the process by copying the one drive folder and all its content by faster means (e.g. over a LAN or using removable storage) first. That will reduce the amount you need to synch via the internet.

Where else?

That takes care of most of the basic files. However you will also likely have data held inside applications like email programs, or even things like Windows Sticky Notes. To move data from these locations will either require that you export the data from the application to a file, move that to the new machine and then re-import it, or you might be able to use specific knowledge of the application and how it stores its data to move stuff more directly. Good places to look for application data are in the Roaming or Local folders in the AppData folder as described above. If in doubt, do a web search to see if there is a reliable path for moving data for your particular application.

There is also another hidden folder typically in the root of your boot drive called C:\ProgramData

Moving folders within that will sometimes allow data for an application to be copied.

Your settings and other data

Moving your own files is usually not that difficult, however you also have other stuff you may want to preserve like the passwords saved in your web browser or you web history, or your bookmarked pages. Each of the web browsers have ways of exporting and importing these kinds of data, so you can export for example your passwords to a file, move that, and then re-import. Note also that most web browsers have a way to synchronise this information to a cloud account. If you set this up on the browser on the old machine, tell it to synch, and then replicate it on the new one, it will automatically restore all the synched data.

Your applications

While in theory it is possible to move and installed application, doing so can in some cases be very difficult. This is because when many applications are installed, lots of supporting files are installed into other parts of the file system. This will often include code libraries added to the list of windows DLL files, and extensive settings written to the system registry, or saved in individual settings files that may not be in the main program files folder.

So it is usually safer to re-install the application from its original source (i.e. the downloaded installer, or for CD/DVD etc) and then try and copy the settings and application data back from the old PC.

Again some web searching will be needed here - each application will be different.

Activated applications

Take care with applications that use product activation. This is designed to stop one copy of the application being copied and installed on additional machines. You may need to "deactivate" the application on the old PC first, before you can install it on the new one.

Everything

OK this is the big one. You have decided that you have too many hours invested in installing and setting up all your software. You have tweaked and configured loads of stuff that you have forgotten you even did it, let alone how you did it, and you really don't want to start over. So what can you do?

There are commercial utilities you can buy that will claim to move more stuff faithfully to a new machine. However keep in mind that even these may not be able to handle all applications. Also keep in mind that if you are moving from one version of Windows to a later one, some of the applications you have installed may not actually be compatible with the new version.

Microsoft are also working on a migration tool, that might make this job easier.

The disk move

One saving grace of later versions of Windows (i.e. 10 onwards) is that they have got very good at dealing with hardware changes. Typically being able to recognised changes to your system and in many cases automatically loading the required drivers for new hardware. This means that if you pull a complete hard drive or solid state drive out of one PC and put it into a new one, there is a fair chance it will actually boot and run. However there are things you should do before you try this, since you don't want to mess up your currently working system!

Windows itself is typically "activated" on a system to verify that you have a legitimate license for it. Once a particular PC has had a version of windows activated on it, you can normally then reinstall any number of times on that PC since the license is held in the Microsoft cloud and tied to a unique signature derived from that PC. Also a Win 10 license will normally allow re-use for Win 11. So again it is wise to make sure you preserve licensing.

BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING ELSE
Before you consider moving a drive from one machine to another, it is a very good idea to turn off any drive encryption service like Bitlocker. If you want to move a drive that is still encrypted make sure that you have your recovery key readily accessible, otherwise you may never see your drive content again!

Win 10 to 11 migration, step by step

The end of support from Windows 10 in Oct 2025 has prompted lots of people to consider an upgrade to Win 11. However a catch is that older PCs don't meet the minimum requirements to upgrade even though the upgrade is nominally "free". That usually means moving to a new PC. The steps described here have a fair chance of getting your entire system migrated to a new machine in one go. However to avoid risking your existing install, you will need to makes some whole disk copies or "clones" first.

When you install a disk from one PC into another, Windows will make significant changes to that disk to try make it compatible with the new PC (and in the process, probably incompatible with the original PC). If something goes wrong during this process it could render that disk non bootable in both new and old machines. So it is important that you have a copy of that original disk - so you can get back to everything as it was.

Same thing applies if you are going to overwrite the disk in the new machine - it is handy to have a way of putting that back as it was. Arguably this is less critical, since you could always install windows on it again from scratch - however if doing a reinstall

What you will need

• You will need an additional SSD, (or sometimes two). The drive should be at least as big as your existing SSDs.
• USB adaptor(s) (either SATA or M2/NVMe) that will allow you connect an extra SSD directly to a PC.
• Cloning software that can copy and entire disk to a new disk. Most SSD makers will have something you can download from their web site. There are also some well known utilities that will will do the same like Macrium Reflect, Clonezilla etc.

How to do it - incompatible drives

Say your old PC has a SATA SSD, and the new one a NVMe M2 drive. The new drive is likely significantly faster than the old one, so you would be better off cloning its content onto the new SSD rather than physically moving the disk to the new PC and using it as the main boot disk.

1. Turn on your new Win 11 PC. Get through the tedious "Out of the Box" experience and to the point were you are logged into an account and can see the windows 11 desktop. Now go to product activation and activate this copy of Win 11. That will make sure that the new PC has an associated Windows license.
2. Unless you are confident that you can re-install Win 11 on the new PC from scratch, it is advisable to make a complete close of the new system to a spare disk now. That way you have a reliable way to restore your new PC to its current configuration.
3. Remove the SSD from the old PC and connect it to the new one via the USB adaptor (or you may be able to install it internally if there is a suitable disk interface spare)
4. Now clone the old SSD onto the internal SSD in the new PC - overwriting the Win 11 install that you just setup! When done, power off, and disconnect/remove the old Win 10 SSD.

If it all goes wrong, you can restore your new PC by cloning the backup disk you you made after completing the setup the first time.

How to do it - compatible drives

If you are content to use your old SSD as a boot drive for the new PC and it is physically compatible, you can use this variation of the process:

1. Setup the new PC and get to the point where Windows is activated.
2. Make a clone of the old PC onto a spare SSD
3. Now remove the SSD from the new PC and install that cloned spare SSD into the new PC, and boot from that.

It it all goes wrong, swap back to the original SSD in the new PC, and the old PC should still have its original setup since you used a copy of its disk, and not its actual disk.

Final steps

Now restart the new PC. It should boot from the copy of your original SSD. It may take a few restarts to get all the drivers installed and working. But ultimately you should end up with "your" Win 10 platform running on the new hardware.

When you are content that all is well, you can then use windows update to upgrade to Win 11.

Sneaky Windows edition upgrade

If you are moving a drive from a PC running Windows 10 Home, and the new PC has Windows 11 Pro pre-installed, you can take the opportunity to not only migrate the complete Win 10 install, but also upgrade to Windows 11 on the new machine, and also promote it to Windows 11 Pro in the process.

To do this, prepare with these steps:

1. Turn on the new PC, and navigate through the initial "Out Of Box Experience", naming the PC and setting up the first user account. If you don't want to use a Microsoft account, opt to setup the PC for "Work or School", and select "Sign in Options" at the prompt for the Microsoft account. Choose "Domain join instead". You can now create a local account.
2. Once signed into windows, click on the start button, and type Activation into the search menu. Check to see if the installation is Activated. If not, click the "change key" button, enter the 5 by 5 character key, and activate that installation of windows. That will make sure that the hardware signature is recorded on Microsoft's systems as having an active Win 11 Pro license.
3. Power off the PC

Next:

1. Install the cloned Win 10 Home SSD into the new PC and power on. Navigate through boot, and if necessary manually loading any additional drivers required from the manufacturers web site.
2. Now download and run the Microsoft Win 11 compatibility checker, to verify the hardware is fully supported and ready for an upgrade.
3. Next download the Windows 11 installation assistant and run that. This will now take you through the process of upgrading the Win 10 Home installation to Win 11 Home.

Finally:

1. You can now take the final step to promote the Win 11 Home install to Win 11 Pro, taking advantage of the license that came with the new PC. To do this, go back into the Activation page (Settings, System, Activation) and select "Change product key". Enter the following key: VK7JG-NPHTM-C97JM-9MPGT-3V66T (Note this is not a real license key, but is a special key used to prompt Windows to switch editions).
2. Windows should restart and upgrade to the Pro edition to match the license associated with the hardware.

If you prefer, you can also do this with the following command line in Terminal, Command Prompt, or PowerShell: "changepk.exe /ProductKey VK7JG-NPHTM-C97JM-9MPGT-3V66T"

Spanners in the works

There are some common problems you might meet:

• One problem you may find is that new PCs with a UEFI BIOS, may not recognise older disks partitioned using a Master Boot Record (MBR) - expecting instead a drive with a GUID Partition Table (GPT) partition. Many cloning applications can change the type of partition used when doing the copy. However there is also a bundled utility called MBR2GPT included with windows that you can use to convert a MBR drive to GPT after you have made a copy of it.
• Missing drivers: the new PC may have hardware that does not yet have drivers available using Windows update. So you may need to download them from the hardware vendors web site. If the unsupported driver is your ethernet or wifi adaptor, this is even more annoying since you will need to get copies onto a USB flash drive from a PC with working internet!
• It all goes wrong and the new PC won't boot the old disk. In which case you can backout and go back to the original setup - using your cloned backups as needed.