You say backup, I say recovery...

[cuffs054]

My XP desktop is soon to go to the "great best buy in the sky". It is throwing blue screens of death more and more often.
I don't want to lose all the music/videos/documents, etc.
So I tried to do what I call a backup. Well, lemme tell ya apparently I don't know what I want.
If I try to do a "backup" I get a message that the confuser can't find the external tape drive. Not a surprise since there isn't one.
I was able to do a "recovery" dvd but don't have a clue what that means. I think all I saved was the programs.
How do I save/copy all the stuff that is in the memory?
So now it looks like I'll be helping the economy out by buying a Chrome book and a new desktop. This will be great since I retired 1/31/14 and my income was cut in half...

 

[rp2813]

I think you do need to have some kind of external drive.  Maybe by now they make something small like a flash drive that you can plug into a USB port.  I'm about as computer literate as you are, so your guess is as good as mine.

 

[vacbear58]

A flash drive

or USB stick is probably your best bet, especially if you are moving to a different operating system. The they go up to quite large sizes (possibly 64 gig - I definitely have a 32gig) and are not expensive. You will need to check what level of USB your PC can support, if you have had it some years it may not support USB2. Another option with be to get an external drive which again you can just plug in, these will accommodate much more and with careful shopping around can be got for reasonably modest cost.

Just "drag and drop" folders from your hard drive to the stick/drive - it may take a while for them to copy depending on the speed of the computer. This is NOT a back-up in the true sense of the word, you are just taking copies of the files in their native format. You should then be able to drag and drop the files to your new computer, and retain the stick or drive as a back-up storage for your files in the future.

I would also suggest you do not dispose of your old computer until you have the new one, what ever that might be, fully functioning for you, and certainly do not delete files on your old computer until you are 100% sure that the files you have copied are correctly loaded on your new system.

 

[kb0nes]

I would also suggest an external USB connected drive of some form. I'm not sure how much "stuff" you need to store but I'd suggest an external hard drive, not a USB memory stick. With the external Hard Drive you can buy 500 GigaBytes of storage for ~$40, a USB Flash stick will cost about 10 times as much per Gig. Also I have had a few USB flash drives fail so I don't trust them as much as an actual hard drive reliability wise.

I'm not very familiar with a Chromebook so I don't know if you have much (if any) actual storage on the unit itself, it may be all in the cloud. You should be able to plug in the external hard drive and access your files direct from the disc. If the Chromebook you are considering has USB 3.0 ports consider buying a USB 3.0 external hard drive, they are MUCH quicker to transfer data. It will be backwards compatible with any USB 2.0 devices too.

 

[DADoES]

 
Backing up files is essentially copying (not moving!) them to another storage device of choice -- tape drives were used in years past, or an additional internal or network (on another computer) hard drive.  USB memory sticks and external USB-connected hard drives are the usual choice nowadays.

The simplest method is manually.  Open two Explorer views (Windows Explorer, not Internet Explorer), one on the target device, the other on the source drive (usually C.  Find the desired folders/files on the source drive and copy them to the target drive.  The trick here is that one must know *where* are the folders/files to be copied (and *which* folders/files).

Alternatively, one can write a batch or command (.bat or .cmd) file with a list of commands to copy the desired material ... then run the .bat or .cmd when desired to do the backup "automatically."

Specific software is available to back up the entire computer.  Windows itself all the way back to Win 3.1 (I think) includes a backup utility, which has in the past been very rudimentary.  I haven't used them in *years* so don't know how much improved the current Win7 or Win8 version may be.

The trick with backup software is that it typically stores the backed-up material in a proprietary format (sometimes compressed to save storage space on the backup media) and the files are not usable/readable unless run through the restore process with the same software.

For instant-readability, backup via the copy method is the choice.

 

[whirlcool]

The internal backup Windows provides was only available on Windows XP Pro, the home version didn't have it.

We have a 1TB external hard disk (USB) and use a program called "Acronis PC Backup" featuring one click full backups. What I like about it is it's quick, gives you the ability to do either full backup or incremental backups of your hard disk. And best of all if you need to restore just 1 file, you can "mount" your backup drive and just copy the file you need from the backup back to your hard disk. Couldn't be simpler.

Or you could use "Norton Ghost" to just make a full copy of your hard disk. If you do this and your original disk fails all you have to do is swap the exteral disk with the internal disk and you are good to go.

There are quite a few options to use, depending on your level of skill.

 

[DADoES]

 
I'm off-kilter on Win3.1 having a backup utility.

WinNT did for sure ... or NT Server at least.

Win95 ... I don't recall but probably not.  It did have a util to generate a recovery diskette, which was just the Registry and required "boot" files.

XP ... I've only used the Pro version, and have not used the backup util.

Vista ... haven't had the pain of it, LOL.

I do use Win7 Pro but haven't investigated the backup util there.

 

[kb0nes]

In this case I think the OP just needs to copy all their files directly to an external drive. Using backup software (MS or aftermarket) won't work here since the idea is to move cross platform from Windows to the Chrome OS.

Just copy all the photos, documents, music etc. to an external drive which can then be accessed from the Chromebook.

 

[whirlcool]

In that case I'd use Norton Ghost. They can then just copy anything they want back from the old drive to the new drive and still have the old drive as backup.