It shouldn't take too long to transfer 7GB of data over a network with Fast Ethernet (100MBPS)... that's what I did here when I had to format my HDD.
But if you have another HDD on the same PC with enough free space, that's undoubtedly the better solution...
7GB is nothing nowadays, really... You can get to that size even without audio/video, which are the main space hogs I think.