I have been troubleshooting my Mother’s laptop and although her data was backed up, her USB ports were not checked. She would be taking her laptop back to the repair shop on Monday, but her data is more important to her.
Behind the TV in the lounge, sits a lonely WiFi access point with the capability of serving as a file server via USB attached storage. I have a 32GB (actually 29GB) flash stick and temporarily saved the contents into a backup folder. Using that USB flash stick as the file server’s storage, I started copying and pasting her files and folders to the file server. The first half of the files sat on the drive and took up 28.8GB. I ejected the USB storage device, popped it in a USB port on my computer, cut and pasted the files and folders into a folder on my backup drive. While the files moved, I took another USB flash stick and used that to copy the last 350MB of the first half of the files, as well as 20% of the second half of files, seeing as I only had 1.41GB to spend.
After a few minutes I replaced the USB flash stick and copied the last 80% of the second half of the files – this would take five hours to complete. I overheard my Mother talking about an electrical storm in the wee hours of tomorrow morning and I decided to unplug the TV by the wall…without thinking of the WiFi device!
It took me a few moments to realize this blunder once I checked the status on the router’s control panel – I did wonder why the refresh wasn’t working and showed me errors. I figured I was tired and powered the router and then checked the network share. I restarted the transfer, stood up and then I retired to bed after typing this.