A week ago I clicked on the X, top right, of my VDO to move from the Google window to My Docs. The screen turned black in a nanosecond although the mouse pointer was still live . An expert advised over the phone that it was "a Windows problem" and I should turn the computer off, then on again after two hours. No use but he fixed the problem this morning, saying it had been an update that had got stuck.
Has anyone else experienced this? I found it terrifying as I have about 35 years' worth of material on the hard drive, quite apart from things that need daily checking.
|
No, not experienced it.
You surely have backups of your own important data? If not, do so, pronto, as you could have an "underlying health issue" with your PC - and even if you haven't it may have some other abrupt unrecoverable fault.
The unsophisticated way would Just get a memory stick, they are cheap enough, and copy all of your stuff to it. Then update it every so often. Something like this should be adequate, depending on the size of your data. tinyurl.com/yans2osa
There are cheap and free programs which would do a better job of it though.
I can happily assist you offline (i.e. by email or phone) if you want some help with this. Just Report this message to the mods which will ping me a message.
|
Many thanks for your offer, Smokie. I was using an external hard drive for back-up but it was found to be defective this morning and has ben scrapped. I have three sticks, mostly for photos and will add this one. My "Local disk C" has 75.8 Gb (out of 138 Gb) on it so it looks as if the whole lot can be accommodated on the stick.
I had never heard of USB 3 before but it seems that it is USB compatible.
|
USB3 is just the latest version and is (considerably) faster than the previous versions. But to take full advantage your machine AND the external device need to be USB3. An older machine may not be USB3, but a USB3 stick will still work with it.
Seems a bit drastic to scrap an external disk. They can get damaged but also something simple like a duff cable or power supply can cause issues. Or even a reboot sometimes fixes it. And that's before you start the technical troubleshooting!!!
You really don't want to be wasting your time (and disk space) copying the whole 75.8 Gb of disk every time. You determine where your data is and only back up that part of the disk. Better still use a synchronisation program, take a base syn of everything then each week just run the program again to update your backup with any changes. You could even run two versions of this so you always keep an older version in case of mistakes.
Sync programs aren't difficult to use, once set up. You determine what you want to sync, then the job is saved and you just go in whenever you want and run it. You have options like whether to keep older versions of files (but this increases the storage you need). Most also have a scheduler so you can set it to run automatically according to your schedule.
Finally if you have the space you could image your disk which would not only back up your files but also mean you can recover your PC back to that date if something goes irreparably wrong with your Windows. You can image the drive say once a quarter which would effectively give you an extra backup.
Once again, I'd be happy to assist setting stuff up (free) if required.
|
Thanks again. I will see how things go with the new stick.
The external drive was shot to the extent that my serviceman was unable even to open it, so no work could be carried out on it. It was ages old, being a hand-me-down from my son, who had already used it for a long time. The man said its technology was obsolete but he wrecked it for me, for the sake of security, snipping various wires and bending all the socket pins.
|
|
I tend to put them in a hessian sack and let the neighbour's John Deere run over it!!
|
Sudden death - smokie
