I have questions about backing up.
I know You can use CD'S to back up but I do not want to because they eventually break and don't hold that much space.
Should I buy a external hard-drive?
Also I don't have to use CD'S what does this mean I went to back up and it says I can back up on my DVD drive?
Also there is something called a Acer factory disc. Can you put this on a external hard-drive to? or can it only go on a disc?
Thank you very much
CDs or DVDs are useless for any serious backups. I recommend you get a couple of external drives for that. here is a website that gives you an idea: Deals on Storage Devices
The Acer Factory disc is an installation/recovery disc that needs to be read with the optical (CD) reader.
Here is how I do my backups: Imaging with free Macrium
Get a dock that you can easily exchange drives by just unpluging and plugging in. You can get one that will run esata and/or usb. Then get a large 500Gig or Terabyte drive and use it for backups. You won't be sorry.
Thank you both for the ideas. Looks like I'll look for a external hard-drive that 750GB drive on that website you posted is pretty cheap.
I tried putting a CD in to download the Acer thing on there says I need a DVD.
So you definitely can't put the acer factory on a drive?
You need 2 DVDs to make the Acer Factory Recovery disks. These will enable you you restore your computer to the state when you first turned it on. Acer will have an eRecovery area allowing you you do the same factory recovery from a hidden partition on your internal HDD.
You will also need to make at some stage a "System Repair Disk". This is an important DVD which you can make within Windows. The option will appear on the Backup & Restore page. With Acer you shouldn't need to download one.
Images , backups etc always use the ext HDD approach you are planning.
Windows inbuilt imaging and backup works fine for most people.
By all means get free imaging software like Macrium Reflect free as a safeguard.
Agree, get a large external HDD, eSATA connection will be the fastest.
Macrium Reflect is a very good free backup program.
I don't understand what is imaging software used for do you necessarily need it to back up stuff?
Depends what you mean by "stuff". If you want to backup your user data, you can just copy it to any other (preferably external) drive. But if you want to backup the OS and all the installed programs with all their settings and tweaks, then you need imaging. When you restore the image, your system will look exactly the same way it was when you took the image - and that can include your user data too.
Have a look at this, it may give you a better feel for it.
Case1 - Lets say your system stops working because of a virus or any other software malfunction. Then you just pull in the last image (from when the system was still OK) and you are back in business. That restore operation takes appr. 20 to 30 minutes (depending on the imaging program you use and the speed of your disk).
Case2 - Your disk with the OS and all your data breaks. Then you buy a new disk, install it and pull in the image from the external disk - same operation as above. In little time you are back in business.
Case3 - your computer broke completely because you dropped it or it fell into the water. Here an image cannot help you because you cannot transfer it to another system.
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