Unfortunately computer hard drives have a life span of roughly three to six years. Hard drives can also fail prior to that due to a power surge or a number of other causes. Protect your family photos, financial information, legal documents and other important files by making a backup. External hard drives provide an easy solution to protecting and backing up your important files. Windows 7 includes a backup program designed to work directly with external drives.
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Difficulty:
Moderately Easy
Instructions
Things You'll Need
An external hard drive
A USB cable (don't worry, generally these come with your external hard drive).
Open the "Start" menu and click "Control Panel." Click the "System and Maintenance" section. Click "Backup and Restore."
2
Plug your external drive in before proceeding. Click the "Set up backup" link on the right side of the window. Click your backup drive in the list that appears.
3
Click "Next" to continue. Pick a backup option. If you let Windows decide, all your user files will be backed up, but Windows won't back up programs, items in the Recycle Bin, temporary files or files on a FAT-formatted file system. The manual option lets you select individual folders and even click a check box to create a system image, to create a complete backup.
4
Click "Next" after selecting an option, and after selecting the files to back up if you decide to choose manually. Windows automatically creates a schedule, click "Change schedule" if you prefer a different back up time. Click "Save settings and run backup" once you've finished editing the backup.
Tips & Warnings
If you make significant changes to your computer files or add important documents, you may wish do the backup procedure above once again, copying only the new and/or changed files to your external hard drive.
There also exist external hard drives that automatically start backing up your computer as soon as you plug them in, without any special software or additional work on your part. They go by the name "ClickFree."
Sometimes external hard drives may use two USB cables to provide power.
Sometimes external hard drives use what's called a "firewire" connecdion instead of USB. These are, however, less common. Do not purchase this type unless you are sure that your computer can support this.
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