Brian Gaff wrote

Why cannot some enterprising person make a network drive that can see
what machines are on the network and back them up when they are seen?

They can, and do. But it gets tricky backing up
files that are in use on a Win system, remotely.

Easier to do it on the Win system.

"Oliver" wrote in message
...
On 11/10/2018 10:32, Broadback wrote:
I have been using a Maxtor external drive, sadly it has stopped working.
As the drive does not like windows 10 I cannot test it easily.
I have a desktop computer with 931Gb drive of which 103Gb is in use. I
would dearly like a simple, well easy to operate, backup and restore
software and a suitable external drive. All help welcomed. TIA

For drives, I favour Western Digital though I am using a Toshiba portable
drive (USB) on this laptop. For software, I've been using Macrium Free
for some years now and it have never let me down - and it is very cheap!

One of the best things I learned over the years is to divide large disks
running under Windows into at least two partitions. I reserve one
partition for the operating system with as little else as reasonably
possible. So I can backup and restore my main "C" drive in less than ten
minutes. Other data I backup and restore less frequently.

Since I retired I don't bother with scheduled backups, I just backup and
restore as required. I backup the C drive after updates or other major
changes, and I restore it after installing unwanted software or
suspicious activity. Data drives, including email, I backup about every
fortnight.

--
Oliver