Posted on 01/08/2015 3:36:14 PM PST by TurboZamboni
BFL
The only way cheaper than a flash drive is pen and paper.
Depends on what you want to do. If your preference is to backup the entire drive, OS and all, then Ghost or Acronis are excellent choices to do that. If your laptop hdd fails, you can install a new drive in your laptop and recover the entire thing using Ghost or Acronis.
If all you're doing is backing up your DATA (Documents, spreadsheets, music, etc..) then pretty much any external USB drive sold today comes with a decent backup program to do that. EaseUS is pretty popular and I have that on my kids computers to backup their school data.
You'll need a separate hard drive to backup to. USB drives work well with laptops for that.
Is all the 250G of stuff on the drive “that” valuable to you ?
I always keep important stuff in its own directories.
Then I can easily back up on thumb drives.
External hard-drive.
Bookmarked.
I have a passport, but apparently it needs to be ‘formatted’ or something.
I couldn’t get it to work. it would get to a certain point and seem to quit.
(like I said, ‘novice’)
What I’m trying to save is everything from an old Toshiba (Vista)
Eventually, I hope to move it to a much newer HP (Windows 8.1)
I’ve seen some that had that stupid encryption on them. You may need to delete all of the partitions on it and make a new, single one (assuming there i no data on it that you need)
+100
To be more explicit, for the last 8 years, whenever I set up a brand new windows PC, I create a new partition (Usually Drive D, or whichever the first available letter that is not already occupied) and designate it entirely for data.)
Usually I just reserve triple the space occupied by the new system "C" Drive as C (to allow future software also to be installed to C), and the remainder to drive D. As the hardware has evolved, and hard drives gotten larger. This has gotten easier and easier to accomplish.
I have been able to upgrade one or two Windows versions without affecting my data at all.
The same strategy can work by having a newer faster 2 GB drive exclusively for software, and a much larger physical drive for Data. That is the ideal.
A couple of years ago, I got an NAS wifi 4TB hard drive. Now, my desktop, laptop, and WDTV box and ROKU with Plex can access the drive.
I then put some of the common data files on it, so they can be accessed from either my desktop or laptop without having to pull up the network directories.
It seems that technology has finally reached a point where peripherals can ‘talk’ to each other.
I use thumb drives for interim preservation of important stuff.
BKMK
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