In terms of.... I didn't attempt to fix anything. I had identified or had identified to me that my battery was about to go, and I needed it on my current work laptop at the time.
It was decided that before the battery failed and I lost all my data, I had to change laptops. When I did the transfer, as you say, I just copied files.
The DIY was as simple as a kind of a Control+C and a Control+V, so it was copy one file to the network—