How do you avoid leaving things behind when you move to a new laptop?

Particularly if you're the type who sells or gives away your old laptop...

 

Zero fill HDD or secure erase SSD?

 

dban or physical destruction of the media, depending on the age and condition of the drive.

 

Replace the hard drive with new hard drive and do a Factory install on it so the person your giving it to will start fresh and new and have no left over data from your previous hard drive. Beyond using a zeroing program and then doing a factory install also will wipe clean any information back to factory install so you don't have to worry about personal information being seen by others not to see them-assuming the hard drive is still good and if not follow the first advice would help the next person using the computer.

 

Dban every time, and its free. data is recoverable if you know what you are doing even after a factory install.

 

dban should be enough for consumer stuff. dban and physical destruction is the only way to be 100% sure, but after a few passes of dban, someone has to be extremely motivated to even bother trying to get data off of the drive. Unless you have confidential stuff related to your job or you are working for your country's department of defense, there is no need to go all the way to physical destruction.

 

We deban from dozens up to few hundred computers every week, only those are physically destroyed that are too old to be refurbed (not worth the time) or already broken.

Altough physical destruction in this case means a trainee and a hammer. Most of the time there is no injuries

 

If you wanna go old school and proper, at least a 4lb hammer or vise clamp it.

 

Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear - what I meant by "leave behind" was more in the sense of:

"Oh crap, I forgot to copy over my photos when I got a new laptop half a year ago, and now I don't have the old laptop anymore! All the photos I took when I went to Hawaii are gone!"

 

Back stuff up?

 

Create an image of the drive if you don't trust yourself to move all the files/folders onto media prior to nuking the HDD/SSD.

 

What I do is I create a new folder in the root of the drive and then I enable hidden and system folders and go through every single folder on the computer and move the things I want into my new folder.
I mostly use the same username in Windows so then I copy over some stuff in C:\Users\[username]\AppData as well.
I bet there's an app for all of that though.

 

Hi, Microsoft provides information on transferring data from on old PC to a new one here - http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/...-settings-from-another-computer#1TC=windows-7

You might also like to try OneDrive to back up your files and photos on your old PC to then be able to access them on your new PC and most other devices - onedrive.com