Today someone asked me to backup or transfer his data from his old notebook to his new notebook. I did not expect some unexpected crop up…

Plan A… I setup both notebook on a network so it can talk to each other. Shared the whole D drive of the old notebook. Old notebook running on XP and the new notebook running on Vista. Explore the old notebook from the new notebook and “drag & drop” all the shared contents into Backup folder in new notebook. It took more than 3 hours to complete the transfer of the 40GB data. The network is running at 100mbps… if I used the WiFi, I think the process will take 8 hours… unfortunately some 90 files were not transfered because their file name are too long… and the worst part, the Vista only tell me there are 90 files not tranfered… damm… there are thousands of files and folder, how am I going to compare the contents in the shortest time.

Plan B… I said, forget about that… I’m going to transfer the file into Network Attached Storage (NAS). Luckily, my 1TB Maxtor NAS arrived yesterday. So, from the old notebook, I just “drag & drop” the contents into the network drive…. unfortunately, the same problem occur… double damm…

Plan C… I remember I have SyncToy in my notebook. From my notebook, I mapped the shared folder from both notebook as drive P: and drive O: on my notebook. Then I fired SyncToy and create a profile to make a mirror image of drive P: to drive O:. Run the profile… cool it’s running very fast… then “toing”… the windows error message appears telling me file x has too long name… so I went to the old notebook and rename it. Then re-run the SyncToy. The “toing” repeated a few more times and I fix the files name everytime it “toing”. I left it running… since it’s already 6.30pm and I need to rush to buy 4D… I just left it running in the office… We’ll see tomorrow if it works….