Virus warning!!!

[Robin]

Wow, thanks.

My set up seems to be basic but different. Drive C has pretty well everything on it, including all added programs and all my data files. Drive D on mine is a 'removable disk', which may be the card reader for C-Map Planner or the card reader on my Lexmark All-in-one? Drive E is labelled 'data' and only has the HHDRecovery Disk on it and some 104GB free space. Drive F is the DVD RW. There is also listed separately Kodak Flash Drive and Nokia Phone Browser which I guess is because I also have a Kodak All-In-One and occasionally connect the Nokia phone.

Does that mean I could, with suitable software, do a simple backup of Drive C either to an external drive if I buy one or to Drive 'E' or even both?

I'm not sure if the HDDRecovery disc on E is something I did or more likely is the Win XP Recovery Disk that was an included option that came with the computer which is actually running on Vista Business. I gave Vista a try initially and then never felt any need to dump it and go back to XP.

My main concern is that I'm running Quicken for my business accounts which is no longer supported in it's UK form and wasn't upgraded for Vista or Win 7. I got it working on Vista when I bought this machine following advice found online and also found a licence key from the same place to get it going. I back up the data from it to flash drives and if needs be I have an old but very shaky XP laptop with Quicken installed that I could put this on. Our other laptop is on Win 7 and will not run Quicken anyway. All I need is for it to last about 4 months more when I will shut up the business for good!

It does seem also that by not using Drive E other than for the HDDRecovery Disk that in effect the 230GB HD I bought is effectively only half of that as I'm running it!

 

[grumpy_o_g]

Does that mean I could, with suitable software, do a simple backup of Drive C either to an external drive if I buy one or to Drive 'E' or even both?

It does seem also that by not using Drive E other than for the HDDRecovery Disk that in effect the 230GB HD I bought is effectively only half of that as I'm running it!

OK, so you've got one physical disk with two logical partitions on it, known as Drives C and E. You could back up to Drive E but, as it's in the same place physically, you'll lose the back up when you lose C drive.

You are indeed losing half your drive the way it's set up. Somehow the recovery partition has ended up much bigger than it needs to be. It's normally only 5GB, just enough to hold the recovery image.

I'd get a largish external drive (I'd recommend 1TB with a USB 3.0 connection if you can find it at the right price). Install easeUS or some other software that will back up your drive image (i.e. make an exact copy). Check the back up by changing the BIOS settings to boot the laptop off the USB drive.

That's the simplest solution. If you're happy the back up works you could then use some software to shrink the E drive partition to 5GB and after that you'll be able to expand your C drive partition to use the rest of the physical disk, which should make your C drive about 220GB or so. It's unusual to lose data when you do this but certainly not unknown so you need to be sure your back up works before you try changing the partitions.

I'd recommend backing up the entire disk once every month and keeping the last two or three copies. Then once a week or even every day you can separately just back the files that change, including or excluding specific directories/folders. That way you don't waste time backing up temporary files and stuff like Microsoft Office all the time.

Does any of that make sense?

 

[Robin]

OK, so you've got one physical disk with two logical partitions on it, known as Drives C and E. You could back up to Drive E but, as it's in the same place physically, you'll lose the back up when you lose C drive.

You are indeed losing half your drive the way it's set up. Somehow the recovery partition has ended up much bigger than it needs to be. It's normally only 5GB, just enough to hold the recovery image.

I'd get a largish external drive (I'd recommend 1TB with a USB 3.0 connection if you can find it at the right price). Install easeUS or some other software that will back up your drive image (i.e. make an exact copy). Check the back up by changing the BIOS settings to boot the laptop off the USB drive.

That's the simplest solution. If you're happy the back up works you could then use some software to shrink the E drive partition to 5GB and after that you'll be able to expand your C drive partition to use the rest of the physical disk, which should make your C drive about 220GB or so. It's unusual to lose data when you do this but certainly not unknown so you need to be sure your back up works before you try changing the partitions.

I'd recommend backing up the entire disk once every month and keeping the last two or three copies. Then once a week or even every day you can separately just back the files that change, including or excluding specific directories/folders. That way you don't waste time backing up temporary files and stuff like Microsoft Office all the time.

Does any of that make sense?

Pretty much yes and thank you very much for that.

It does show too that a huge HD isn't really needed in my case, since I'm only using half of it anyway and still have nearly half of the half free on that! Quite surprising really since I have pretty much all of the USA charts in both raster and vector formats, plus the entire world set of CM93s loaded, quite apart from all the usual business stuff and programs etc.

I'll get a suitable external drive and that way can back up the second (SWMBO's) laptop as well.

Once again, many thanks indeed!