Need to back up everything externally - How is best/quickest please?

mamazaac

We recently bought a new Acer Aspire T180 desktop, but have a couple of errors occurring and have been told by the Acer support desk that we need to do a system recovery to rule out that the problem is a software related one. This of course will mean that we lose everything we have installed on the pc as it will go back to its factory settings. We therefore have to back up everything before we do the store. We still have our old computer as our son is going to use it, but there are things of his on it so if we copy everything back on to there, after the new computer is fixed we will have to trawl through everything again to extract just the items we want (which took quite a long time when we first had to do it!). In addition, we only have a 2GB memory pen, so we cannot copy everything on in one go. Alternatively, my IT department at work has advised that we get an external hard disk drive, but even on ebay these are quite expensive, although I guess if we buy a 2nd hand one we can always sell it back on for roughly the same price.

Does anyone else have any other suggestions please? And if we do buy an external hard disk drive can we connect it straight up to the computer or will we still need to use our memory pen, limiting how much we can move at any one time?

As you can imagine, we are not very happy about having to do this ourselves considering that it is a new computer which shouldn't have any problems, but I guess we are stuck with it so any suggestions for the quickest and cheapest option would be much appreciated please.

Many thanks in advance.

mrscruffy

mamazaac wrote: »

We therefore have to back up everything

How much do you have to back up? (right-click on My Documents and select properties)

mamazaac wrote: »

We still have our old computer

Is there sufficient space on this?

mamazaac wrote: »

We only have a 2GB memory pen

You could create a new folder on the desktop of the old PC and copy across the different folders 2 or three times

mamazaac wrote: »

Does anyone else have any other suggestions

If you have a CD writer you can back up onto this although if a 2GB pen drive is not large enough this might use a few CDs!
You can try networking the PC's and doing a direct transfer and you can also get connectors to connect them via USB.

fox2319

You could either back up to DVD (4.7GB per disc) or get an external hard disk. Sounds like you need one of these anyway.

Cheers

Jeff

superscaper

Also you should be looking at it as a permanent solution. You should be backing up anyway! Eg if you had a hard drive failure you'd have lost everything! Take "don't put all your eggs in one basket" to heart. I occasionally backup a few things to an old internal hard drive that came from my old pc. I also backup essential files and documents to cd and dvd quite frequently and backup the entire my documents to dvds. Also I make cd/dvd copies of any downloaded programs and drivers. On top of that I use Carbonite's online (unlimited capacity) backup service which backs up whatever I have selected and keeps the changes backed up as well. I also plan on getting an external hard drive.

Basically just think, are you planned for any contingency. For example if I had a house fire or a burglary I still will be able to recover all of my data.

albertross_2

what are the problems with the PC?

mamazaac

mrscruffy wrote: »

How much do you have to back up? (right-click on My Documents and select properties)

Is there sufficient space on this?

You could create a new folder on the desktop of the old PC and copy across the different folders 2 or three times

If you have a CD writer you can back up onto this although if a 2GB pen drive is not large enough this might use a few CDs!
You can try networking the PC's and doing a direct transfer and you can also get connectors to connect them via USB.

Thank you for your reply. I don't have a lot of my documents stuff to copy across in terms of size, but my husband has a couple of large programmes which takes us over the 2gb limit. Networking the pcs or connecting them via USB seems a good idea - if I do one of these can I just give the computer one instruction to copy everything at once or do I still need to copy/paste or select each individual item to move it? Also, is the networking or the USB option the cheapest/easiest please and what would I need to buy? And I didn't think about creating a separate folder on the old pc, so that might be useful, but can program files be copied into that as well as documents?

mamazaac

superscaper wrote: »

Also you should be looking at it as a permanent solution. You should be backing up anyway! Eg if you had a hard drive failure you'd have lost everything! Take "don't put all your eggs in one basket" to heart. I occasionally backup a few things to an old internal hard drive that came from my old pc. I also backup essential files and documents to cd and dvd quite frequently and backup the entire my documents to dvds. Also I make cd/dvd copies of any downloaded programs and drivers. On top of that I use Carbonite's online (unlimited capacity) backup service which backs up whatever I have selected and keeps the changes backed up as well. I also plan on getting an external hard drive.

Basically just think, are you planned for any contingency. For example if I had a house fire or a burglary I still will be able to recover all of my data.

Thank you for your reply and you have a good point, although it wouldn't be life or death if we lost stuff, just a nuisance. The computer does have an option for me to back everything up, which I thought was going to be sufficient, but I guess if the hard drive failed I would lose that anyway. Does Carbonite charge for that service as, if not, that would seem a very convenient way to save any important stuff although presumably program files cannot be stored there?

mamazaac

albertross wrote: »

what are the problems with the PC?

Thank you for your reply. Here is a copy of what I put in the email I sent to Acer Support:-

---

1. When switching users, the computer keeps restarting itself. It switches users successfully, but when you try to open an item from the new user's desktop, the computer restarts which loses all the open programs for the previous user. When the computer has restarted, a "recovered from A serious error" report message appears. When I click for details of the data error report, the following information is displayed.
Error Signature
BC Code: cz
BCP1: 00000007
BCP2: 00000CD4
BCP3: 001A0019
BCP4: 8208F6D0
OSVER: 5_1_2600
SP:2_0
PRODUCT: 256_1

Technical Info about the report
C:\DOCUMENT~1\SHARON~1\LOCALS~1\Temp\WER0623-dir00\Mini041907-04.dmp
C:\DOCUMENT~1\SHARON~1\LOCALS~1\Temp\WER0623-dir00\sysdata.xml

2. Internet Explorer keeps shutting down and I get the error message "Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for any inconvenience. The error report details for this is as follows:-

Error Signature
AppName: iexplore.exe
AppVer: 6.0.2900.2180
ModName: msvcrt.dll
ModVer: 7.0.2600.2180
Offset: 00037f89

The "technical information about the report" is too lengthy to repeat here at the moment, but if you need it please let me know.

It then says, "the following files will be included in this error report":-
C:\DOCUME~1\SHARON~1\LOCALS~1\Temp\701f_appcompat.txt

3. An Acer eData Security Management System Info box keeps popping up whenever a user first signs in which says:

!Personal Secure Disk Mount error; please reboot the computer and try again.

---

I do have to say though that I haven't had problem number 2 re internet explorer for quite some time though, so maybe that was a problem with IE, not my computer. In case it helps, here is a copy of Acer's reply:-

---

It sounds like it may be advisable to perform a system recovery on your machine to rule out that the problem is a software related one. In order to do so, you will need to launch the Disk2Disk recovery feature (which should be supported by your machine). This can be initiated by pressing ALT + F10 when the computer is first switched on. You will need to hold down ALT as soon as the Acer splash screen appears, and repeatedly press F10. The window of opportunity is very small, so this may take a few attempts. The Disk2Disk recovery feature allows you to recover the system without recovery CDs. This will return your system to factory settings and will delete everything stored on the machine. If possible we strongly advise backing up anything important on your machine before starting the recovery process.

If you are unable to complete the recovery process, please do not hesitate to contact us again, as there may be another problem with the machine.

---

If this means anything to you, I would be most grateful for your comments.

PaulK_3

Have you looked in event viewer? (control panel, admin tools)

albertross_2

As a start, try running chkdsk

start run

chkdsk c: /F/R

and reboot.

has the switching user problem just started? If it has, you could try a system restore to undo recent changes.

Could you recreate the other user account or create another one, and see if you can switch to that successfully ?

superscaper

mamazaac wrote: »

Thank you for your reply and you have a good point, although it wouldn't be life or death if we lost stuff, just a nuisance. The computer does have an option for me to back everything up, which I thought was going to be sufficient, but I guess if the hard drive failed I would lose that anyway. Does Carbonite charge for that service as, if not, that would seem a very convenient way to save any important stuff although presumably program files cannot be stored there?

Carbonite charge about £20/year which is the cheapest by far. For me backing up is important for both my phd stuff and my engineering designs for my client. But I presume you'd want backups of things like emails, photos etc. Even just for convenience of reinstalling in case anything goes wrong it's always worth making cd/dvd copies of things.

Online storage is probably over the top for most people and should only ever be something like your third line of defence anyway.