MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
Just had a huge clear-out of old tech stuff and have 3 old (Microsoft based) laptops that I need to remove pictures from and have a load of old SIM cards and SD cards of various physical sizes that I’d like to check over and remove any nice memories and put on to better storage.
As well as the above I have uni documents on my previous laptop (Microsoft) that I want to save and be able to access from my new MacBook (and of course save new documents from my MacBook to)
What are my best options? As you can see I haven’t clue! A external hard drive for the bulk, a flash drive for a go between? And of course, the multi-card reader......What can you recommend?
(I hope that makes some of you IT bods twitch 😂 )
Bump for the ‘working’ crowd
Cloud storage FTW. OneDrive, Google Drive, whatever fruity equivalent Apple provides.
Card readers are much of a muchness and ten a penny. Does your Mac not have an inbuilt SD slot perhaps?
Cloud storage FTW.
Wait, having said that,
How old are the old laptops? If we're talking XP SP2 era or older, do not connect them to the Internet or they'll be riddled with malware by the time the desktop's finished loading.
Some form of USB storage would be more appropriate in this case. Exactly what depends on the volume of data you're talking about. You can get a decent 128GB USB pendrive for sub-£15. Bigger than that, you're into the realms of USB hard disks, you can get a 2TB drive for £60 and bigger / smaller for varying amounts of spend.
Be aware that external drives using 3.5" disks (sometimes marketed as "desktop" solutions) will likely be bigger / cheaper but will require an external power connection so are less convenient.
Get a cheap 2.5" USB hard drive caddy, (or three) off Amazon or eBay. That'll make it easy to pull all the documents and photo's off the old drives and then you can just reformat them and use a external HDD's for future back-ups or whatever.
(edit - that's future back ups in addition to some kind of cloud based storage.)
If you went for the Air, you'll need a USB-C to USB adapter to use a pendrive.
Old Laptop (+card reader as required) > USB Pendrive > MacBook Air > iCloud (or similar)
☝ There you go.
Thanks all, have the USB-C to USB Adaptor. I do use cloud services but don’t want to rely on these as had an issue with documents not saving to my uni one.
I do use cloud services but don’t want to rely on these as had an issue with documents not saving to my uni one.
Relying on any one service / device is a mistake, anything can fail. But one issue with one service does not make them inherently bad. I'd trust almost any cloud provider over a spinny disk any day of the week.