June 2003

Transfer Large Cookbooks From Old to New Computer

Suppose you just got a new computer with NYC installed, but your previous NYC installation and all your cookbooks are on your old computer. Now you want to get your cookbooks onto your new computer, but even zipped your cookbooks are over diskette.

You could put all the .zip files into one .zip file that spans multiple diskettes using WinZip. In other words, create an “allcookbooks.zip” file on your A:\ drive, then use WinZip to Add all your .zip (zipped cookbook) files to it. WinZip will prompt you for additional diskettes as it needs them to span the “allcookbooks.zip” file across how every many diskettes it needs.

Here are a few other ways to get your cookbooks from your old to your new computer to get around a 1.44MB diskette size limit:

You can first try making the cookbooks smaller for the transfer via diskette:

Export your recipes to a text file. Text files are smaller than NYC cookbooks and may fit on diskettes. NYC cookbooks are databases with lots of extra space in them for unused recipe fields.

Defrag your cookbooks to make them smaller (Tools… Data Management… Cookbooks tab… Defrag) – then they might fit on diskette.

Or break the cookbooks into smaller cookbooks using File… Export Recipes… to other NYC cookbooks so that when zipped each cookbook will fit on a 1.44MB diskette.

Failing that, you need a transfer medium other than a diskette. One of these may work for you, depending on your system:

Network the computers. If both computers have a network interface card, you don’t need a hub or anything fancy to network them. Just plug a “crossover” cable between them and set up a little 2-computer network. Then share the drive on the old computer (rt click the drive in Explorer and use Sharing…), and map it on the new computer (Tools… Map Drive…). Then use File Explorer to copy-paste from your old computer to the new one as if the shared drive on your old computer were another hard drive on your new computer.

Burn a CD (640MB) on your old computer and transfer to your new computer using its CD drive. You will have to uncheck "read only" on all the files transferred this way – files copied to CD seem to get labeled read-only during the process.

Email them to yourself and retrieve on the other computer. With large cookbooks, this works best with a high-speed broadband connection like DSL or cable but it will work on 56K modem too (it may take a while if the cookbooks are large).

Install the old hard drive into the new computer (make it slave to your existing hard drive). See your computer manuals on how to do this.

Hook up an Iomega ZIP drive (100MB or 250MB) to the old computer, copy the zipped cookbooks, then hook up the ZIP drive to your new computer and retrieve the zipped cookbooks.

Purchase a 16MB USB port key to put into a USB port (it looks to your computer like another hard drive) then copy the data and put the key into your new computer to retrieve it. I just got one of these from Dell ($30) and it is VERY handy because almost every computer has a USB port, and the key looks like a cig lighter – even has a hole on one end for key ring. I carry it wherever I go.

Use a direct PC-to-PC connection (see your Windows Help on this) using a direct PC-to-PC parallel cable between the parallel ports on both computers.

Where there's a will there's a way...

See previous NYC Tips

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