[happy]

I have had a PC for 10 years but I feel I am falling behind with the latest technology. SO I may ask for advice on simple things.

My first question is what is the easiest method or in thing to back up my hard drive? It is full of stuff and it's 3-4 years old and a crash would be a real bummer. What do you all do?
Hap

[joe5]

Hya Happy , welcome to PCHF.

You could copy everything to cd or dvd , or if you are willing to spend some money on it , you could get an external HD (or a "normal" second HD) to back everything up.

And you could also used webbased storage facilities.

[merlin]

Ya joe has the right idea about buying a second internal hard drive and copying all the important stuff up. Also can use (one of my favs and free) cobian backup. Which will save alot of space. you can find it below..

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/cobbackup.html

[jolancer]

If your computer is 10years old... it probably only has a 5GB harddrive or something like that?

What i do is, i have a Bunch of Internal Harddrives i collected because they have become cheap with all the rebate deals nowadays. so i just use Multiple Harddrives... (i copy any files i know i wont to keep forever onto a Harddrive and then i unplug it from the comp untill i need it next time... so its not waisting life and energy when i dont need it)

But if you only have minimal stuff to back up... you could just get a USB Flash drive, like 1GB for 50bucks, at placess such as Newegg.com , or just another Harddrive since they are cheaper but just not portable unless you get an external HDD enclosure.

[Bluefish]

Well if you're computer is 10 years old I guess is has no CD burner?
How many space is there on your hard drive?
I'd suggest the option of buying a new internal disk, but you'll maybe have to buy a big sized one that's more expensive and your 10 years-old PC perhaps won't recognize all the space.
You could also maybe borrow an older harddisk, copy over the files, and then put that harddisk in another computer which contains a burner so that you can easily back your data up to 1, 2 or maybe 3 CD's.