Transferring Wii U data from USB drive to external HDD

I've been using my on-board Wii U storage, but it hasn't been enough, so I've been swapping stuff back and forth off a USB thumb drive (hopefully haven't ruined the poor thing).

I now, finally, have an old USB 2.0 external HDD I can use, 2TB.

How do I get my stuff from the USB stick onto the drive?  Apparently the Wii U can only recognize one external storage solution at a time?  There is not enough room to put everything onto the on-board Wii U memory and then on to the external HDD.  The only way this would work is if I can empty the on-board storage onto the HDD, disconnect it, empty the stick onto the on-board memory, then empty that again onto the external HDD.  Will this work?

Hopefully someone understands this process and can educate me before I have to learn via trial/error.

When you plug in the second one and turn the wii u on it'll ask you if you want to transfer but it will be slow.  You may want to transfer them on a computer

Oh wow!  Okay, cool.  Didn't know transferring via computer was possible.  That's great and will be much easier.  Thanks!

I don't know if you can, but I imagine it should be fine.  Even if it doesn't work, you should be able to just plug in the original to the wii u and do it the right way.

Yep, it was really easy.  If you have two USB things plugged in, it gives you a kind of warning about it and asks you what you want to do, and it then allows you to copy/move stuff.  Cool!  It was all really easy.  Now my internal memory is empty and everything is on a very roomy 2TB external HDD (which seems to actually load stuff faster than the internal memory oddly enough).

Oh, good, I may need to switch my flash drive to a external HDD if it loads faster (I have a 64 gb one attached currently)

Gden said:

Oh, good, I may need to switch my flash drive to a external HDD if it loads faster (I have a 64 gb one attached currently)

Click to expand...

Yep, that was me, too, although I think mine was 32GB. Nintendo always says not to use flash drives because it will wear them out. I don't know if that's true, but I didn't want to wear mine out (it's USB 3.0!). Anyway, the external hard drive definitely loads faster than the thumb drive. I don't know if the hard drive is faster than the internal memory, but it's definitely not slower. I'd say it's faster than the disc drive, too, or at least as fast. I'd be curious to see a comparison between internal memory, an external hard drive, a thumb drive, and the disc drive.