On 04/04/2010 13:35, The Medway Handyman wrote:
I save anything vital like my business accounts on to a memory stick, but I
don't backup general stuff - which could be an inconvenience if anything
happened.

I have Norton 360 which has a built in back up feature - but it doesn't
work. Drives me mad.

Everytime it reaches the stage 'Insert DVD' it them claims the DVD isn't
empty. Tried loads of different makes& the DVD slot works OK with
everything else.

So, would I be better off with one of these online backup companies or
buying some kind of external device?

If the latter, any suggestions to a PC numpty?


What you haven't done is tell us how much 'stuff' you've got. As already
mentioned, DropBox can be very useful for 2GB (free). And Google allows
up to 8GB total (think that includes mail - but you can have multiple
accounts).

http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=50092&hl=en_GB

But you also need to think about what exactly you would do if you lost
your current PC. You need to consider applications (no good buying a PC
and either not having the applications you need or finding they don't
work under the Windows 7 you have found on your replacement machine).
And could you borrow someone else's machine for a while?

And how you would recover from your backup? Make sure that you can
actually do so. In fact, I would recommend backup your your whole PC
using whatever backup tool and also backing up documents separately.

Online storage, memory stick, USB drive, NAS drive - all fine but don't
rely on just one.

Make sure you have details of all user names, passwords, unlock codes,
etc. for when you took the backup/installed the software/etc.

For a basic backup, the standard Windows ntbackup.exe is possibly
usable. But you might need to manually install it from the CD in Windows XP.

--
Rod