Every time you see the word "Cloud" in relation to computers, substitute this phase:

"A computer owned by a stranger"

Sure, that stranger may promise to hold it securely for you. He may even promise not to look through it. He may also just make it disappear and good luck getting him on the phone.

You could distribute your files on a blockchain distributed network, like Sia. This securely distributes your files all over the world so that no one stranger's computer has the entirety of it. That's not convenient though, so no one bothers.

Move everything to iCloud then you never have to worry about data loss or transfer from one device to another. I love it as I can travel north and can still have all of my files available to me. I also created a recipes folder, scanned in my fav recipes and then I always have them when I am north. Definitely worth the move. It’s like $2.99 a month for 500gb. And since you’re not Apple, you can One Drive instead of iCloud.

I had a laptop crash. I went to MMD Computer repair on 441 in Lady Lake to see if they could fix it. It was not worth repairing so I bought a new laptop from MMD. They cloned the new computer from my old hard drive. Works great.

I would use microsoft's "onedrive" and not move them from PC to PC. Move them from PC to onedrive and then access them from the new or old PC via onedrive.

For those who don't know, OneDrive is a very good deal. For $70 per year, you get Microsoft Office on all of your devices and 1TB of cloud storage on OneDrive. You can go to the Microsoft 365 website to sign up.

It's 15GB of free storage in addition to unlimited free photos. At least, that's the deal if you have an android phone or a google account.

I get LibreOffice free, and all of the Google products free. Of the 17GB of data I'm allowed, I'm using only 2. I ALSO have a copy of my entire hard drive on a thumb drive, zipped up nice and pretty, as a backup. I ALSO save all files to my thumb drive, which I keep in my desktop computer all the time except when I switch it to my laptop when I travel. I update all new and edited files to google cloud once a week, it takes seconds.

This way I'm covered whether there's internet or not. I have access to everything, all the time.

There are lots of options. I actually use about 500GB of space on OneDrive, most of which is for uncompressed music files. I also like the fact that anything I create on any device is automatically copied to OneDrive and immediately accessible anywhere. Unfortunately, a lot of people do not take advantage of any back up options and they sometimes lose valuable data.

I'm a founding member of the Department of Redundancy Department. Old-style computer tech, back in the days of component machines, before laptops were a thing.
DIP switches for life, baby.

On the Google Play store there is a "Send anywhere" app. By putting this app on both laptops (or PC, smartphone) you can select which file/photos/video/document/spreadsheets/etc you want transferred from 1 device to the other device. Once you select the files you want to send, your given a code. On the device you want to receive the files you then open "Send anywhere" and put in that code and indicate you want to receive the files. The files are then transferred from one device to the other. There is a ad you may have to watch prior to the xfer which at one point was a bit much (free version). I believe they have minimized the ads. You don't have to buy a flash drive and can test it out with the free version.