Any computer geeks in the Corridor need a few bucks helping me with my PC laptop?

[Django]

I bought an external hard drive and apparently didnt read enough of the instructions. After backing my entire puter up I cant download what I want anymore and cannot figure out how to organize everything Ive backed up. I need some hands on help. PM me if interested. I have friends who would probably help me but Im always asking them for help and would rather just pay someone who knows exactly what to do and show me how to do it.

[Rochelle St.]

Try Geeksquad?

[Krawlspace]

Never go to Geeksquad unless you like paying hundreds of dollars for a $40 service call. The kids they hire make less than $10/hr and have no A+ or MCSE certs. 90% of the machines they take in they ship to a facility out of state. Their in-home techs are trained to up-sell the client to a new machine. Seriously waste of time and money.

If you are looking to backup your data, any tech worth his salt will tell you that the only effective backup is off site. If you have an external drive for back up and it's in the same location as the device being backed up it does you no good in the event of theft, fire, etc. More than likely the external drive will be stolen or destroyed as well. So you're really only protected as far as data corruption.

Personally and professionally I have used an online backup service called Carbonite. There are several other alternatives, but I've found Carbonite to be the easiest and most user friendly. The cost is $55 a year I believe, the software itself is free. Simply download and install from their website and Carbonite backs up everything in the most common locations, i.e. My Documents, My Pictures, etc. You can tell it to back up any file or folder on your machine however. Modified files are backed up within hours of changes, in real time, with minimal system resource consumption. Recently they've added a feature where you can access your backed up data from any machine via their website. They also have a service for a little more money that enables you to back up your entire system so you can do a complete restore if Windows registry gets screwy or some other fatal OS corruption. You also have the ability to restore single files rather than the full system which is huge if you're looking at data corruption.

There's nothing to configure, nothing to try to figure out how to get back. Very user friendly and in my opinion a great value for a buck a week.

I've had over 10 years in IT, am A+ and Net+ certified and have my own computer repair business. If you have any questions message me and I'll be happy to help.