PC Backup on Seagate External Hard Drive

blunomore

blunomore

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Good people

I had a number of IT people help me previously to do backups of info on my external hard drive, e.g. when my laptop crashed, when I bought a new desktop, etc.

The result of this - the external hard drive contains a few different versions of backups (some obviously be more complete than others, depending on the date it was done).

I would like to clean the external hard drive and start a new backup that I can keep updated on a regular basis. OF COURSE I will do the new backup first before deleting all my info.

MY QUESTION:

I 've never done this before (always been done by the IT guys), so is there anyone who can put down his vuvuzela long enough to assist me with step by step instructions ?

Thanks :)
 
I think the easiest for you would be, assuming you are running Windows XP, go to START/PROGRAMS/ACCESSORIES/SYSTEM TOOLS/BACKUP and then follow the wizard to choose what you would like to backup :) I am sure other Windows Operating Sytems have a similar tool in a similar location.

Another way to backup documents and files of course would be to keep them all tidy in one folder and simply copy/paste that folder onto the external Hard Drive every now and then. A common practice would be to keep everything in your MyDocuments folder and just copy that folder to the Hard Drive every time you want to back it up. However you need to know where to find your MyDocuments folder, you can't copy that link on your desktop for instance.

If you would like to backup your entire PC state with all the programs and everything installed exactly as it is now and everything else identical including drivers that would be called imaging not backing up and is much more advanced :)
 
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If you are going to manually copy them then fyi by default I copy paste the following folders if I want to transfer things from one PC to another.

C:\Documents and Settings\(my account name)\My Documents
C:\Documents and Settings\(my account name)\Desktop (For all my desktop icons)
C:\Documents and Settings\(my account name)\Favourites (For all my Internet favourites)

I right click on them and select copy. Then I go to the external drive (Usually E:\ but can be something else) and right click in there and say paste. Do this one at a time for each if you are not sure how to select more than one using the control key.

You would of course also need to backup your email stuff if you use a local email client on your PC. Thats a different story.
 
This one seems to have an autobackup which seems so much easier than copy and paste.

I just do not know how to get it started.
 
Get yourself Cobian Backup (Opensource and free) and then run through the easy to understand backup config
 
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