[MEDINA]

Really unfamiliar with external harddrive. Can I back up my entire hard drive onto an external hard drive. Of course the external hard drive has more capacity than the hard drive I am backing up. Specifically will it back up the programs and the data?

If I back up today and hen work on the orginal computer and enter more data can I back up again on the external harddive? Will it overwrite or create a different folder for the different date?

Thanks

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Hi and welcome to Geeks to Go. How you choose to back up to an eternal hd is entirely dependent on your choices, and the capibilities of what ever software you use to do the backup. Norton Ghost makes a complete image of the hard drive. For backup, don't know why you would want to backup your programs since you can always re-install them. I would expect the best approach would be to back up the data files only. Like I said, that is up to you.

[austin_o]

Hi and welcome to Geeks to Go. How you choose to back up to an eternal hd is entirely dependent on your choices, and the capibilities of what ever software you use to do the backup. Norton Ghost makes a complete image of the hard drive. For backup, don't know why you would want to backup your programs since you can always re-install them. I would expect the best approach would be to back up the data files only. Like I said, that is up to you.

[macten]

Like Austin said, you don't want to backup applications or the operating system. You just want to backup data files. I'm assuming you aren't using Ghost to do an 'image' backup.

A real easy way to backup data files is to copy and paste. Right click on the start button and select 'explore'. You'll see a tree with all of your folders. Your external drive will show up also.

Let's say that you save a lot of files in 'My Documents' folder. Just right click on the folder and select copy. Then scroll down to the external drive and right click on the right pane and select paste. You've backed up that folder and it's contents.

There's more to it than that but that's a start. Once your data files are backed up we can discuss backing up favorites or bookmarks depending on your browser. If your using Outlook Express we can point you to some documentation on the Internet for that.

Some people like programs that do it for them but I like copy and paste......