In message , Biggles
writes
Mike Hibbert wrote:
LynLyn wrote:

OK - first let's establish that I am a technophobic middle aged mum
who
knows not a lot about computer hardware......my daughter has come
home from
school and requested the purchase of a memory stick to make life easy
transfering info from our home PC to school and vice-versa for projects.
She also tells me that I would find one useful for backing up our
harddrive
instead of worrying myself to death that one day I'm going to lose all my
info from our computer.

So can any kind person please tell me what I should be looking for,
how much
it is likely to cost and where I can get one from (preferably online).

Many many thanks in advance for any help you can offer - and
apologies for
cross posting and maybe using the wrong newsgroups...

Lynette


Hello,
I think your daughter has a good point. I would get one and back up
all the useful stuff you need, stuff like your personal data
(basically everything in your my documents folder - word docs and
excel spreadsheets etc), stuff that you wouldn't want to lose. I
wouldn't suggest you use it to back up all your programs etc., there
are better ways of doing this.
Have a look at how much data you want to backup and then at least
double i (or treble it) and get the next size memory stick up from
that. Have a look on somewhere like amazon or dabs, they are fairly
reasonably price on there.
Mike
DO NOT use a USB memory stick as a backup device. Why not? Well, you
can lose it, damage it, corrupt it.

I had one die on me a couple of months ago - I could read from it but
not write to it.

It contained a backup of my company database, payroll and banking
information. (I always back up to TWO pen drives having anticipated the
possibility of this sort of occurrence)

I had one hell of a job getting CPC to send me another without sending
the original back, containing sensitive data

So, whatever medium you store information on, just think what you would
do if it failed under warranty and you wanted it replaced

--
geoff