What do I backup when moving to a new machine?

I had a request on the forum for information on where to look to back up information when you are moving from an old computer to a new one and you don't want to lose important data.

You would obviously begin with the My Documents folder and all of its subfolders, My Pictures, My Music and so forth. You may also have made other folders for yourself that you store data in. Don't forget to include downloads of installation files for programs you got online. Check your desktop for these, and other things like pictures you may have stored there. (I do not recommend storing anything on the desktop for more than temporary use. If you have data files, store them in My Documents and put a shortcut to them on the desktop.)

That's the easy and obvious stuff. What about Favorite places? In Internet Explorer go to the File menu and choose Import and Export. You'll get a wizard that will walk you through exporting your Favorites to a file called bookmark.htm. By default it is stored in My Documents. You can also export cookies - yes, you may actually want to do this! Those will go into a file called cookies.txt. When these get copied to your new machine, you open Internet Explorer and go to the File menu, Import and Export, and import both of these files back into your browser.

Now there are email and address books. This gets a bit more complicated. If you use Outlook (not Outlook Express), it's fairly simple. You have a file called (probably) outlook.pst. You can do a file search for it, but make sure you are showing hidden files and folders, as it will be in a hidden folder. Copy that file to the new machine. [The actual path to that folder on a Windows XP machine is: C:\Documents and Settings\(Your Profile)\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Outlook.pst.]

If you are using Outlook Express, do a search for *.wab and you will find your Windows Address Book. Copy that to My Documents. You can then import that into Outlook Express on your new machine. Transferring email with Outlook Express is more difficult.

The easiest method for transferring Outlook Express information to a new machine is to use Windows XP's Files and Settings Transfer Wizard. You need a Windows XP CD to run it on the old machine, if the old machine does not have Windows XP on it. MVP Gary Woodruff has an article on using the FAST Wiz here: http://aumha.org/win5/a/fast.htm.

If you are a more advanced user, you can use this procedure written by MVP Tom Koch: http://www.insideoutlookexpress.com/backup/clone.htm. None of this is truly simple, unfortunately. Tom also has a simpler procedure that will back up your mail folders, but not all the other "stuff" that goes with it. You can find the simpler procedure here: http://www.insideoutlookexpress.com/backup/simple.htm.

If you are moving to a Windows Vista machine, the new transfer utility is called Windows Easy Transfer, similar to the old FAST wizard, but improved. You can read about it on Microsoft's site here.

Of course if you use web-based email, you don't have to worry about transferring anything. You'll just log onto your mail account as usual and all will be there.

Now you have to have all that pesky email account data, like user name and servers and passwords. This is pretty easy from Outlook Express! Go into Tools/Accounts/Mail tab and click on your email account. Then click the Export button. It saves your information in a .iaf file. Copy this to your new machine, go into the same area of Outlook Express and click Import and point it to the .iaf file.

In Outlook, the easiest thing to do is to go into Tools/Accounts and copy the settings onto a piece of paper.

What about those passwords you told your computer to remember and then promptly forgot yourself? There's help for that too! Go here: http://www.snadboy.com/ and download Revelation 2.0 and run it. It will reveal the passwords under the dots in the password fields of your programs. Make sure you write them down.

Now we have to think about data that various programs store in their own program folders. Open My Computer or Windows Explorer and navigate to the Programs folder and open it. There you will see a list of all the program folders for programs you have installed on your machine. Scan down them to identify any programs that may have data files. For instance, if you use Microsoft Money, it keeps its data file (MyMoney.mny) in the root of the Money folder. Spend some time really going over each program and thinking about any data that you may have associated with that program. This is most commonly where data would get lost.

This article isn't meant to be a tutorial so much on how to get these things done, but really more of a list of where to look so data doesn't get left behind. If you have questions on how to do any of these steps, please go to our forum at www.computerhaven.info/forum and ask for assistance. We'll be happy to help you!