backing up question

mrs_baggins

My pc is about 5 years old now and the last few days its making a very wierd noise when its on. Although windows came pre loaded on it i have put loads of programmes and things on and on the whole I have the discs for these-well the important ones at least. I have copies of all documents I would not want to lose on my external hard drive as well as copies at work and at home. I do a system restore every so often as well which i know will only work if i can actually get my pc working.

So with all this in mind is it actually worth backing up? and to be honest i really dont know how to go about it anyway. I used nero back it up yesterday and saved my c drive/programme files to ex hd but not sure if the worst happened this would actually make the progrmmes work as I am sure they have other bits of their code (cant think of the word) elsewhere and not in the programme folder so any thoughts please!

macman

Sounds like you have already taken good precautions against data loss. You can save the whole lot as a disk image usihg Acronis Truer Image, Norton Ghost or similar.
But why assume your hard drive is failing just because you get a 'weird noise? That could be any other component, if you are getting error messages that is more likely to indicate a hard disk or OS problem. Can you describe the noise a better? Take the side panel off and try and lcoate the source of the noise. Could be power supply, dust clogged up the fan, lots of things really.

busenbust

You could even use Windows Backup to backup to an external drive. Regarding the actual backup of programs (and data), you could create an image (clone) of the drive onto an external drive. Something like TrueImage or Ghost offers this feature. I suspect Nero has the same feature?

mrs_baggins

To be honest now I have listened to it a bit better I think it may be a fan problem which from what I understand is reasonably easy to fix. But thanks both I think I shall look into the making a clone thing a bit more and hopefully will sort it out. I am getting no error messages and the pc starts ok its just very noisy now

busenbust

^Glad you got it sorted:)

LeeSouthEast

5+ years, it's likely the fans are clogged with dust, fluff, cat hair, carpet bits, pixie carcasses and all sorts. Take the lid off, get a can of compressed air, and give it a good blow out.