User permissions when transferring to a new computer

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

Hi. I backed up most of my things using WD smartware on their 2TB My Book, and recently my computer died.

I’m currently using a backup laptop (also W7), with my portable hard drive, and when I attempted to access the files a UAC prompt came up saying I needed to give myself permission to access these. I went ahead and did that, let it sit, and afterwards it let me through on the spare laptop just fine.

Everything else on the drive that I didn’t copy over with WD smartware worked just fine, without me having to go through that. I compared them and noticed that “Everyone” was in the permissions lists for the files that worked, so I added that to WD smartware’s backups.

I’ll be switching to a Windows 10 computer soon, will adding “Everyone” allow me to access and copy over the files there without any more trouble, or will I have to do something else to get into these?

2

If you are switching Operating Systems I’d recommend a manual copy. While an automatic backup is convenient, a migration is best handled manually in order for files to be cleanly copied.

3

Well, I wasn’t originally planning on it. Backed it up using Smartware months ago and my old PC suddenly died on me. I can’t go back and do a manual now. It was mostly just images and music anyways, all of them are seemingly intact.

I was just wondering if I would be able to use these files on windows 10 (without Smartware).
Don’t know how windows 10 handles changing ownership of the files, or if it will even let me.

4

I had the same problem when I tried to restore my backup to a new computer. What I did was to ensure that the document folders are all in the same user hierarchy as the original computer.

Sometime when you restore the backup to a new computer - the folders such as Document, Pictures and Videos all goes to a User sub sub sub directory that is when all the relative referencing goes haywire. All you need is to manually copy and paste content of each folder from the sub sub sub User folder to the correct root User folder in the new computer and all the relative referencing should work.

Good luck to all.