What do I need to do before I run my recovery disk?
February 212010
My laptop is running slow and I want to restore it to factory setting. Do I need to delete files before I run my recovery and applications and drivers disk and if I do, what files do I need to delete? Should I run a backup file every week and do I need a disk to burn them on or just run backup?
You don’t need to delete anything. Backing up is the critical part. You can use a back program, or just drag and drop files onto a USB stick, external drive, DVD-R, or other media.
In addition to personal data, you need to have your applications that didn’t come with the computer (e.g., MS Office) on disc (or other media) & ready to reinstall after the recovery.
February 21st, 2010 at 7:34 pm
No on deletion. Of course back up your files. Usually that means everything in My Documents and the folder that has your email files.
You’ll have 2 choices when restoring. One is a reinstall where your personal files will stay and the other being destructive where it will be returned to factory state.
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February 21st, 2010 at 8:01 pm
Backup important files on removable media. You can put them on a external hard drive, flash drive or cd/dvd.
You do not need to delete anything first. You should however run a anti-malware scan, some viruses can survive recovery.
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February 21st, 2010 at 8:40 pm
You don’t need to delete anything. Backing up is the critical part. You can use a back program, or just drag and drop files onto a USB stick, external drive, DVD-R, or other media.
In addition to personal data, you need to have your applications that didn’t come with the computer (e.g., MS Office) on disc (or other media) & ready to reinstall after the recovery.
References :
February 21st, 2010 at 9:21 pm
Whoa! not so fast there cowboy.
All the time you see Q’s about driver loss after a re-install.
Before you do anything, back up your current working drivers to a separate CD!
Reformatting will sometimes ‘loose’ the drivers or not get the correct updated one.
With separate CD driver storage, accessing and installing functional drivers is far easier.
Try Driver Magician Lite (freeware);
http://www.snapfiles.com/Freeware/system/fwbackup.html
Use it to identify & back up all drivers for this BU. Always keep it with your unit.
Backing up data, using any utility, will depend a lot on whether or not you use the Windows DEFAULT for documents, photos and so on.
If your 3rd party application "saves" to a different location (like the desktop for instance), you must be sure to copy those separately, or they will be lost.
Windows has a backup built in (System Tools> Backup), but I find it bulky & hard to use.
Backups should be the ‘all’ data option as a baseline; after that use the ‘incremental’, which saves only new items, and changes to originals. This saves space on your backup media.
Ideally 2 copies are made of each backup: one kept with the unit, one kept ‘off site’ in case of fire, storms, etc.
One decent B.U. application is ‘Cobain’ (moderately easy to use; freeware).
http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm
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