Question about backing up.

Dreamnine

I have an Advent 4213 netbook, been running for a few days and smoothly so far.

Norton 360 is installed- it seems to be running normally but keeps popping up and asking me to back up files, specifically a 9.3 GB folder of audio files. It's offering me the option of storing online or on another part of my HDD. Is there any point? I already have these files on a thumb drive.

Also if it asks me to back up other files in the future, should I? Which files and how often? Apologies for my cluelessness here.

kwikbreaks

Unless I'm very much mistaken the Norton software will be a limited period free trial and you will be asked to pay a licence later. Given that there are perfectly good free antivirus, spyware, backup, and firewall tools available you need to question whether you will be keeping Norton 360. If not then the next question is whether or not the backup files can only be read by the Norton software.

If you have your data duplicated already then there is less need to back it up but a pen drive is a long way from secure - they can and do fail and obviously being small and portable they can be lost.

Backing up to a seperate area of the same disk only guards against accidental corruption or deletion. It's better than nothing but not much.

So long as you have the means to restore the netbook to how it was received then backing up the operating system becomes optional. You own data needs backing up unless you don't mind the risk of losing it.

The best place to backup is to an external hard drive (stays at home so won't be lost so easily) I personally use Acronis TrueImage to take an image of the entire disk and keep all my data on a network RAID but that may be considered overkill by many.