How to backup your computer with an external hard drive (HDD)

hello and welcome back in today's video i'm gonna be showing you how to use one of these an external hard drive to back up your files now if you already know what one of these things are and you've used them before then this video is not for you in fact i do have a video right up there where i explain how to do more advanced things with your hard drive such as automatic syncing mirroring backing up your files like that and all using a program that microsoft gives you for free that most people don't even know about but in this video i'm going to be stepping you through how to use a hard drive how to plug it up for the first time and how to backup your files this video is for those of you who are just now getting into computers or you've just purchased a hard drive like this to back up your files and you're a little bit intimidated in this video i'm going to be showing you how to back your files up using a hard drive and i'm also going to be showing you what not to back up because there are actually files that you don't need whenever you are copying and pasting things so i'll be stepping you through that process thank you all for clicking on the video and i hope that this video is helpful now in this video i'm going to be using windows 7. for most of you who are going to be backing up your computer you're probably going to be using an older operating system so that's why i chose windows 7. now all of these things i'm going to be showing you have stayed the same since windows xp all the way up to windows 11. so if you are following along with a different operating system that's perfectly fine all these steps will work for you so the first thing that i want you to do is go ahead and locate my computer and open it up on windows xp and windows 7 by default it was on the desktop now sometimes in windows 8 builds it was on the desktop but moving forward into windows 10 and windows 11 they removed it from the desktop so if you do not see the my computer icon on the desktop how you can get to it is to go to the folder icon and then on the left hand side you will see the my computer just click on that [Music] now inside of the my computer you will see different drive options most of the time you will see the c drive which is your computer then you are going to see the d drive or the e drive which is usually a dvd player or a cd reader now you will not see a or b because that typically is reserved for floppy disk now once you have your my computer brought up what i want you to do is go ahead and plug in your hard drive when you plug it in you're going to see another drive up here you're going to be greeted with a window like this and that will let you know that your drive is open now this window will not appear in windows 10 it will actually appear in a little box in the top right corner you'll have to enable it there and then open it up but in older operating systems the auto play window that you see here will appear and you'll be able to open the folder up directly so go ahead and click open folder to view files when you do that you're going to see a new window you can just drag that over to the side and that is your hard drive now at this point you can just copy and paste or drag and drop any files that you want to back up so for instance i'm going to go into my musics folder and you can see my music files here i could select every one of those or i could just drag the whole folder over into my hard drive and now you can see that all my files are saved there something that you want to watch out for however is something called shortcuts for instance this right here if it has a little arrow down in the bottom left hand corner of the icon then it is a shortcut and a shortcut does not actually save anything it's just a link to something else so whenever you copy something you don't want to copy a shortcut that's not backing up anything if you actually want to back something up you have to go to specific folder that it's in and as you can see here with the shortcut it says location and then tells you where to go so if you follow that path out you can see it's in the c drive program files [Music] and free cam 8 that is actually the location of that now the reason why i explained that to you is because let's say that you want to copy all of your files from a directory over to the site for instance let's say that you want to copy all of your downloads by just dragging your downloads from the left hand screen to your hard drive well as you can see right there it has that little arrow and it says as a shortcut and it says location of that is somewhere else so if you want to down if you want to back up all of your downloads what you need to do is actually go to the file itself so i'm just deleting these right now since we don't need them go straight to your downloads and then if you look up at your url bar you can see different names or different folders that that file is inside of and if you click the folder next to the downloads in this example the name of the computer is called john then you'll be greeted with the other folders that are in that area and you can drag and drop that folder over and that will give you all of your files and as you can see this is actually a big file and it's not a shortcut because it's copying files over now the last thing that you want to do once you have all of your files copied over to your hard drive is eject the hard drive now in previous versions of windows before windows 10 and windows 11 you actually needed to select the hard drive and eject it otherwise you could damage the hard drive go down to the bottom right of the screen right where it has that little arrow that says show hidden icons click on that it'll show you a list of icons that are running in the background one of them is going to look like a little usb dongle with a check mark click on the check mark it's going to come up with a list of everything that is attached to your computer and you want to go down to the one that says the disk drive that you are currently using for instance we are using disk drive f to back up our files so we are going to select eject udisk now your backup may be something completely different as far as the name and the drive that you're using so make sure that you double check which drive you're ejecting your hard drive that you've been dumping stuff into is going to vanish and it's going to come over the window it says you're free to remove your drive and that is how you back up your files onto a hard drive if this was helpful for you please go ahead give us a thumbs up consider subscribing to the channel and until next time have a great rest of your day hi i'm kyle owner and operator of great technical thank you all so much for making it at this point in the video and if you are here go ahead like and subscribe to the channel it helps us out a lot and it lets me know that the content i'm making is stuff that you all like to see go ahead leave us comment as well let me know if there's anything that you would like to see in the future or if you have any future updates that you would like to have included in our products in the future i would also like to say that being a company owner i am very proud to be able to support businesses and students i am also extremely proud to be able to support content creators so if you have a content platform you make videos or if you have a blog and you would like to reuse some of our content or if you would like to review some of our products go ahead and send me an email my email is right here support graytechnical.com get in contact with me we can see what we can get worked out and until next time thank you all very much have a great rest of your day

Channel: Gray Technical

Views: 111,388

Keywords: how to back up your computer, how do i backup my files to a hard drive, how to use a hard drive to save your data, how do i save my files and data to an external hard drive, i have a harddrive but dont know what to do with it, how to use a harddrive, how to use a jump drive to save data, gray technical, how to use a harddrive to save your files, how to back up your files with a USB, how to set up and use a hard drive, ways to back up your computer files, how to save and export data

Id: ye3JoZtvUcU

Length: 9min 19sec (559 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 18 2022