Hi,

I just spent about an hour trying to backup the data in my laptop to a remote hard drive, but failed. My version of XP did not even have the backup software installed, so I installed it but it did not work. When I tried to copy everything to my F drive it would not do it. Does anyone know of a good, easy to use piece of (free) software I can download to back up my drives ?
Someone suggested one called "Drive Backup Express (32-bit)"

Thanks in advance, Mickmac

why are you trying to backup with windows loaded? If you really wanna make a backup, use a ghosting utility - like Norton Ghost, to clone the drive to an image file (Or another drive).

Download Hiren's Boot Disk 9.7

I am relatively new to this, never done a back up before. Thought it was just a matter of hooking up a remote hard drive and making a copy of whatever is on my computer, in case I lose everything.

Mickmac

If you want to backup your data (important files etc) then use xcopy command and make a .bat file. or search google for free software for that purpose... also look softpedia.com

sorry - yep thats ok if you just need ur files. Connect a USB drive or ext hard drive etc and just drag/drop. But you need to know what you're doing and what needs backing up etc.

Otherwise - use Norton Ghost to make a clone of your entire HDD to an external hard drive, then you wont ever loose anything (we've all had defunct hard drives and then realised we dont have everything backed up)

Thanks for the replies,

I went into My Computer and found the C and D drives, but was not sure how to copy them onto my external hard-drive. Tried to copy and paste but that did not work. Should have known it would not be so easy. Is there a way to drag and drop data from the C and D drives and put it in the F drive ?

Thanks again, Mickmac

hi mate,
unfortunately not. The problem is that if you are in windows, there are certain files on the C drive (Or wherever your operating system is loaded) that are locked by Windows.

So if you are trying to copy the C drive, that will include the pagefile/swapfile on the root of the C drive - which will fail because Windows is always using/reading/writing to that file and has it locked.

By using Ghost for example, Windows is NOT loaded and so it's able to read every single bit of data from the drive.

Alternatively - just go through the drives you have, finding all the docs, photos, email etc that you want to backup.

Thanks mattblack,

I appreciate your advice, will look for some tutorials on the subject,

Mickmac

try to use a UTP cable try to network it with another computer

then transfer the data that you want to transfer

or if you have a flash disk you can transfer the data on it ^^

I think this backupdwarf.com software called Backup Dwarf will do what you want. it stores backups in ZIP archives, can store them on NAS etc.

Originally Posted by mattblack

Alternatively - just go through the drives you have, finding all the docs, photos, email etc that you want to backup.

This really is the simpler method for non-techies. They may need to read up on how to create the backup files from Outlook or whatever email they have. But otherwise, usually, they can identify the photos, docs, spreadsheets that they would need to restore should their PC break down or be stolen.
If this happens, remember that the scenario will probably be that they'll buy a new laptop, which will already be loaded with the operating system and alot of software, so their primary need will be for the documents, music,photos, old emails, browser bookmarks, etc.

I think it's easiest just to clone drives. That way if anything catastrophic happens you can be back up and running pretty easily.

For paid programs, I still like Norton Ghost but if you can't afford it, Drive Image XML is great in my opinion (though the sector by sector copy takes a while)

(DIXML is free)

That's pretty good idea.

Well how about installing to the other PC as a slave or Using DOS. That might help you out on retrieving data. But If you just going to back up soem file burn it to the disk or use an external drive.