Hello Candice,
In addition or expansion to Kerry's advice, you might try using xcopy to do
a simple copy routine of your personal files to your external USB drive.
Right-click on your desktop and select to create a new "text" document.
You can open/edit it with WordPad or NotePad.
Within your new text document, copy-and-paste the below command line.
(copy only what's between the ++++)
This is one (1) line of text, please treat it as such, your monitor might
break it into 2 lines when you open this post.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
C:\Windows\System32\Xcopy.exe "C:\Documents and Settings\Richard\My
Documents\*.*" "F:\Backup of Richard's Documents" /E /D /W /Y /I /R /K
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
Replace "Richard" with YOUR user name.
Replace "F:\" with the drive letter of your USB drive (Maybe "E:\" if you
have only one CD drive).
Replace "Backup of Richard's Documents" to a folder name of your choice.
This will be the name of the folder created on the root of your USB drive.
ALL files and folders within YOUR "My Documents" folder will be copied here.
Save the new text file giving it a name such as "Backup.bat" and exit the
file.
The file name "Backup" can be anything of your choosing.
The file extension ".bat" is critical, leave this as ".bat". (without the
quotes)
The xcopy.exe command is already built in to the Windows operating system.
Therefore you might consider it free.
Using xcopy might be crude, but it's a far cry better than doing nothing...
and it's cheep!
I have a scheduled task setup at work that copies ALL my work documents to
an external drive every day at 10:00AM and 2:30PM.
I'm tickled-to-death with it.
The first time you double-click the file icon on your desktop, it may take
several minutes to run due to all the files it copies. But from then on, it
will only copy files and folders that are either new or have been updated
(via the file time-stamp) since the last time you ran the backup routine.
Be sure to close all files and running applications (that you start) before
running this, open or locked files may trip-up the backup routine.
When you run this, a new (DOS) window will open on your desktop (black
background). You'll see your command line containing the xcopy.exe command
and be prompted to press any key to continue. When it completes, the window
will close and your done.
Here is what the switches at the end of the command line do...
/E = Copies directories and subdirectories, including empty ones.
/D = Copies new files/folders and files whose source time is newer than the
destination time.
/W = Prompts you to press a key to begin.
/Y = Suppresses prompting to confirm you want to overwrite an existing
destination file.
/I = (This helps xcopy differentiate between files and folders) Otherwise,
it will stop and ask you.
/R = Overwrites read-only files.
/K = Copies attributes.
There are many more switches you can use. I find these to be the most
useful.
Like I said, this is alittle crude and does have drawbacks. Such as if you
rename a file OR folder on drive C:, then you will wind up with 2 copies on
your USB drive. 1 under the new name and 1 under the old name. This will
not synchronize the files and folders. It just makes a copy of the files.
It won't rationalize for you either. But also like I said, it's a far cry
better than doing nothing and it will be handy if drive C: crashes. I mean,
so what, twice a year or so, just delete the root backup folder on the USB
drive and start a fresh backup.
Now if I've created curiosity and question, please post back. I'll try to
watch this discussion for several days.
Hope this helps,
Richard in Va.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
