Backing up to external hard drive - help

Purchase a copy of Acronis TrueImage - it will allow you to back up the entire system on the external drive, so that in case of a hard drive failure or major system error you can be right back up and running in 15-20 minutes (vs. hours of reinstalling and configuring Windows manually otherwise).

Syncback is an excellent free application that I use to back up regularly to my external harddrive. After having set it up and selected or deselected

folders, it takes a matter of minutes to back up.

Hello,

That sounded like a really good application, so I downloaded and installed it, but I just don't know what to do next.

It sounds a bit complicated, and talks about profiles etc.  I think that I can set up a profile, but do I need to set up 2 profiles, one for each PC?  I can't find any reference to backing up 2 PC's to an external hard drive.

Also, I have to give the source folder, but I want to back up documents for each of 3 different users.  I tried to just give the source as 'C' drive, but it will not do this. 

 All I wanted to do was backup our files, and anything else that perhaps I should backup, but there is nothing obvious to set it going.

Hi

the initial setup can take 5 to 10 minutes, once you have that you can in the future run the same profile, unless you want to change it.

First question is , do you want to synchronise or just back up the hdd of your pc to the external hd. 

Then you have to create a profile , ie choose the source , most likely  my documents folder of the hdd of your pc, and the destination, most likely 

the external hdd.

Then you get to choose if you want to back up ALL the files from that folder or if you want to omit some folders (in that case choose 'back up the 

source directories files, including selected sub-directories').

Then you run it...

Do I set up different profiles in order to backup the documents of different users?  Do I do the same on my second PC?  It's a bit confusing as the destination drive in my profile is G on this (desktop) PC, but obviously it will be different when I connect the external hard drive to my other (laptop) PC.

I know I sound extremely thick, but this just isn't simple.  It is no wonder many people just do not back up their files.

I have a 1.5 Tbyte external hard drive attached to my computer.  I use Norton Ghost 10 to backup my computer.  The Ghost setup is user friendly and easy to use.  The default setup will create a backup schedule for the entire physical C: drive.  Since my PC is on 24/7, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 10:00 PM, the computer automatically backs up my Drive C: partition to the external.  On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays the computer backs up the Drive D: partition to the external.  Sunday night at 10:00 the entire hard drive is backed up.  I keep 4 backups of each so that I'm never more than one day behind; G-d forbid something happens.  Then at 7:00 every morning, my computer automatically re-boots.  When I come into the office around 9:30 AM, I have a clean computer ready to work.

I have tried the Acronis software, but I still like Ghost.

Different users obviously may have to establish different profiles, since they access different folders. If you 

want to backup from different pcs, you would have to install this application there as well and also create a profile.