Upgrading to Windows 7

Update: My IT sources tell me external drives with NTFS will not perform as described below.

Be ready to have an extra new empty hard drive if you are going to update your files and bring them over to Windows 7.

I have (had) my data backed up across 3 drives using the 3 2 1 method, but when I plugged in one of them to my new Windows 7 laptop, only about 1/3 of the files showed up.

When I say showed up, I mean a bunch of files just were not viewable on the drive.

Luckily I have back up -- but I'm surprised at how un-mad I am at this situation.

I feel lucky to have found this bug and still have my past 2 years of data intact. If I lost it, I'm pretty sure things would be different.

My XP machine has a bad starter -- so while I can fix it, if I want to keep up with my clients, I had to make the jump to Windows 7.

I'm glad I did -- its fast cool and new. I've loaded my original version of Homesite on it (a program from over 10 years ago) and I also
have Filezilla and Photoshop. IE 8 and Firefox 3.6 round out the set up.

Now I just need access to some of my old files -- but in order to update my past work, I have to make sure to also open up to using new technology to get ahead of many in my field that are not using the newest technology.

There are times where for a short while, technology will put you ahead of someone. For whatever reason -- speed, efficiency -- there are technologies that make one perform better.

This is essentially, a bug report -- have a new drive ready to work down from Windows 7 -- you must use this newly formatted Windows 7 drive to dock part time back in XP land, rescue all the data, and bring you into the future.

I'd say about 1 - 2 years of time into the future.

And these days, the further in the future you choose to be, the more productive you can be in the present.