Issue 13.10
I know that I constantly remind everyone to “back up anything important”. One of my great customers gently informed me that I have not addressed how to do that in these articles and that a lot of people would do it if they knew how. I have to plead guilty as charged, but it is difficult to explain in print and very easy to demonstrate. With that excuse out of the way, I will attempt to give a clear explanation to help all of you make backups.
Of course, the easiest way is to buy an external drive, install the backup software that is included with most of them and run it. It will back up your documents file and probably some others. If you want more than that, you will have to customize according to the manufacturer’s instructions.
For the rest of you, here is the basic rundown on how to copy files to another location (whether that is a CD, DVD, Flash Drive or External Hard Drive). First, insert the media you desire to copy to (i.e. plug in the drive to the USB port or insert a blank disk). If the computer doesn’t automatically open a new window showing the blank (or nearly blank) location, you can find it by double clicking on “Computer” or “My Computer” depending on which Operating System you use. Then look for the drive you wish to write to. This can be confusing because it may not be obvious, but if it is not a CD or DVD, it will usually be identified as the drive with the letter furthest into the alphabet. If you already had a C, D, E and F drive, the new one will usually be identified as G. Double click that drive to open its window (if it didn’t open automatically).
Next, find the location of the file or files you wish to back up. You can find most files by Double Clicking on “Documents” or “My Documents”. This should open a second window. (I like to resize the windows by dragging a corner of the window until it is a size that’s easy for me to read.) Then place the two open windows side by side. It is then easy to drag and drop files from one to the other which will copy the files. If you are doing this on a CD or DVD, your copying software should “finalize” (make ready for reading) the disk before ejecting. If this isn’t done automatically, you will need to find out how to do it manually on your system. Because of space limits, I can’t explain it in this article.
You may need to look for some files (especially pictures) in other areas on the hard drive. You can often find them by searching with Windows. For example, if you are looking for photos, you can often type *.jpg in the search box and it will give you a list of jpeg (picture) files. You can click on these files to find the details of where they are stored. Then you can open that folder and back up the files located there the same way we did with the other files.
There may be a few bumps in the road, but if you try this a few times, you will gain confidence and have the added bonus of having backups and peace of mind. As always, I still say… Be safe – and always have a backup of anything important.
Shaun McCausland has been in the computer industry for 28 years (locally with Musicomp & Bits ‘N’ Bytes) and currently does in-home and on-site computer consultation, service, training and repair. If you have questions, you can reach him at 668-7118.