Help with backing up to hard drive

[trulyscrumptious43]

Please can anyone run through this with me.
I have windows Vista on my laptop and a new iomega desktop hard drive.
The hard drive is connected to the laptop and the laptop can see it.

When commencing a back up, the laptop seems to choose as its default mode to save to disc in my F drive, and asks me to insert a disc. I can't choose any other place. I want to back up the whole contents of my laptop to the external hard drive.

Anyone know the process?

What program are you using? Is there anywhere when you are choosing what to back up & where, to change the destination drive to whichever drive letter your external hard drive is?

The other thing to ask is why you want to back up the whole contents of your laptop? The reason is that there will be a LOT of files which you will not really be interested in. 99/100 it's the data you want. So photos, documents, spreadsheets. The Windows system files & programs usually you will have on disk. So heaven forbid something goes wrong, it won't be Microsoft Windows you are upset about but the loss of your photos.

The reason I ask is because backing up your entire laptop will probably take a long time. In my opinion it's better to just back up the files you want rather than everything.

Ok you are probably right here...I only want to back up the files containing documents I've created and my photos.
The automatic back up which the laptop does for itself tried to run yesterday but it didn't seem to be getting anywhere after two hours.
This reminded me that I needed to connect the new hard drive.

Not sure what program I am using ...the automatic one which pops up I guess?
Microsoft Windows Backup?

Still no answer to this one...anyone else out there can help me?

Hi Truly. Sorry this must have popped down the list and I forgot.

Unfortunately I don't use Vista since I find the entire operating system too slow, so I can't fire up the backup tool to help. I suspect on one of the pages the default destination is the DVD drive and you need to change that to your new hard disk. Oh yes, plug in your disk before you start the backup tool too.

That said, what I do for my backups is simply drag and drop the folders I want to my disk. It's crude, simple but very effective.

The reason I do this is that if I do want to restore from a backup, it's unlikely to be an entire disk. More likely the kids have deleted something or I have and i just need one thing back.

Using a backup system like the Microsoft one will take a long time as it hunts inside the backup volume it's created for the file you want.

There are plenty of free tools out there too which do a better job of guiding you through a backup if that's what you want.

You're right that the default backup place is the DVD drive and i can't see how to change it.
So I will get on with drag n dropping then!

What are the free tools to which you refer?