Oh no! Nothing works, not even system restore!

Figment

Has anyone else mentioned you need to backup NOW?

macman

No, you needed to backup before!

angelaloveschocolate

Hi everyone, I have now done a system restore to before my newphew put all his stuff on and hey presto, I'm looking good and back to normal.:)

Now, I realise I'd be foolish to ignore your good advice so I'm ready and willing to do my first back up. Just watched how to do it on youtube and it seems easy enough.

thanks again everyone, your help is much appreciated.


Thank you all again.

macman

Good, but what have you backed up to? A flash drive is neither durable enough nor resistant to being easily lost. An external USB drive is your best option.

angelaloveschocolate

Now c'mon macman, I bet you can tell from my posts that I've never even seen an external hard drive.

I used a flash drive, which, by the way I only bought yesterday and never even owned one before that. lol. Yes, I suppose I am a bit of a dinosaur, I wont admit to my age but I bet I'm old enough to be your mum. So I guess I'm a fair bit away from being very competent on these things.

Do you think the flash is ok for now? Would I have been better to use a dvd, perhaps?

Figment

Using a USB Flash Drive is better than nothing at all, but they are easily lost and prone to failure.

USB External Hard Drives


A portable one may be your best option as they are smaller and lighter than the desktop versions, plus do not need an external power supply.

macman

Flash drives are OK for transfer and short term storage, but they are fragile and liable to be easily lost or stolen. At some point they'll simply cease to read-without warning
DVD's are better-but are you really going to make a regular (i.e. weekly or better) back up to to DVD? Far too much hassle for most of us.
So for a local solution, there is nothing better than an external USB drive running some sort of automatic backup (suc as WD Smartware).
Or use cloud storage if you want a fully automatic, off-site backup.

closed

what did you backup, and with what software?

what is the capacity of the flash drive

copy (don't move) important data to dvd too

angelaloveschocolate

Erm, afraid to say that back up failed because the flash was too small. So right now if seems I. haven't backed up at all.

I used a tutorial that I found on youtube to do (try to do) the backup. press start, control panel, system and security, then back up your computer.

I checked out the hard drives that figment gave me the link for, thanks for that figment, but at those prices I wont be rushing out to buy one.

Perhaps a new flash drive with a bigger memory?

closed

http://www.ebuyer.com/search?sort=price+ascending&subcat=3267&cat=393&store=33&cat=&subcat=3267&page=1

the software to backup is linked in post 2

to backup the whole machine you need a disk big enough