Backing up

urk

Hi - I have just got a hard drive and am total newbie to them. The plan to back up before cleaning the laptop. It occurs to me that if you back up before removing viruses etc that the HD becomes infected and you then need to clean it as well- is this correct? and is it straight forward/obvious how to do it? If not would someone explain how to do it.

My OS is windows XP and HD is a Verbatim 320GB.

Much thanks - Urk

John_Gray

In any event, it is not a generally recommended practice to have viruses on any PC, laptop or netbook! See the sticky at the top of this forums for methods of removal, install and regularly update a decent AV package (if you haven't got one one already)...

londonTiger

there is a sticky thread with exactly the same title here.

googler

urk wrote: »

Hi - I have just got a hard drive and am total newbie to them. The plan to back up before cleaning the laptop. It occurs to me that if you back up before removing viruses etc that the HD becomes infected and you then need to clean it as well- is this correct? and is it straight forward/obvious how to do it? If not would someone explain how to do it.

My OS is windows XP and HD is a Verbatim 320GB.

Much thanks - Urk

Nope. If the virus has infected system files, and you move data files, you don't move the virus with those data files.

Owain_Moneysaver

that's why you keep multiple versions of backups, so that if a file is corrupted you can go back to an uncorrupted version even if that is several backups ago.

urk

Thanks everyone - I didn't post in backing up sticky because when I did so in the pc clean up one I didn't get a response which I did get doing the same query separately. Thanks again Urk.:o