Transferring Files Between Computers: Options

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Nowadays nearly everyone needs to use more than one computer. Maybe you use a computer at home, and one at work. Maybe you have a desktop computer at home, and a notebook computer when you travel. Or maybe you have all three. At one time or another, you’re going to need to move files from one to another. In this article, we’re going to take a look at your available options, and show you the pros and cons of each one.

There are many scenarios which require you to copy files between computers.  You might be required to bring work home from the office on occasion. Or maybe you use your desktop's DSL for downloads, to transfer to your notebook afterward. Or maybe you just want to keep your MP3 collection on your different machines in sync.  No matter the reason, you're going to need to copy files from one computer to another at some point.

Gone are the day of floppy drives. It used to be that most files you would work on would fit on a 3.5 inch floppy disk, which you could shuttle from machine to machine. Most machines nowadays don't even come with a floppy drive anymore.  Why is that? To be honest, hardly anything fits on them anymore. The 3.5 high density floppy disks held up to 1.4 megabytes of data.  Sure, there were other floppy devices that would let you get higher than that, but you couldn't count on it being the same from machine to machine. Even a simple Word document can easily become more than 1.4 megabytes in no time.

Ok, so floppies are out.  What options do we have for moving files from one machine to another?

There are literally a ton of options.  But to keep things simple, we are going to assume that you do not have the two machines on a network, and that you need to transfer data from one to the other.

So what are our options?

1. Burn a CD or DVD.
   
2. Use a USB Flash drive.
   
3. Use an external hard drive.
   
4. Use an online file storing service.

This list could go on all day, but the above four items are probably the most common options available. So let's get started.

Next: Option One: Burn a CD or DVD >>
 

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