How to Back Up a Hard Drive

Series Summary

Computers are complex machines built upon very simple principles. They perform arithmetical operations millions of times over to transform digital information moving at lightning speed into usable human data. A personal computer's job is to help a user create, manipulate, deliver, receive or delete media content. This is a simple, sterile definition that sounds uninteresting on the surface. Nevertheless, these fundamental functions mimic human ability in some surprising ways. Therefore, the computer is increasingly becoming an engine of the imagination, a platform for the digital life. In this free video series on computer technology, software developer Dave Andrews discusses several computer software tips for improving the use and efficiency of a PC. Andrews begins by explaining how to backup a hard drive and troubleshoot a computer. He then discusses a few computer software related tips, such as: how to increase the speed of a PC, forward an e-mail, increase the Internet browsing speed, test the RAM, use Outlook and even how to locate the computer's IP address. Watch these free videos and operate a PC more effectively today.

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews. Today I'm going to show you how to back up a hard drive. First, thing that we're going to do, is click on the start button down at the bottom and click on computer. Let's say we want to back up our hard drive, C, to another drive, which is an external drive, Drive W. Lets go down in to C and select what we want to back up. It's usually a good idea to back up your users folder, possibly your program files and anything else that's on the C drive but many users are going to store their data under users. As you can see if I pull it up it has all the users that are on this system. It's not a good idea typically to back up your windows drive because you wouldn't be able to restore it in most cases anyway. If you had a major problem and you had to reinstall windows in the first place, to get it back up and running. So lets just select users and what we're going to do is right click on it, you're going to say copy and with our external drive connected, click on the start button at the bottom and click computer again. Lets go to the external drive which is, W. We're going to right click and say paste. It's going to begin copying the user data from this PC to a back up external drive. My name is Dave Andrews and I've just showed you how to back up your hard drive."