Back Up Data to a USB Flash Drive

USB Flash drives (sometimes also called "Thumbdrives") are miniature hard drives that you connect to your computer using a USB port. The capacity for a Flash drive has continued to grow over time, as the price continues to drop. A quick seach turns up a number of 1GB Flash drives for less then $5.00. The larger drives should provide enough storage capacity for you to back up a great deal of your data.

Preparation:

Before you begin your backup proceedure, you should prepare those things that you wish to save. Each person will have a different proceedure, based on his/her own personal situation. Below is a general proceedure that you can use as a starting point.

  1. Designate a folder for backing up. This could be your "My Documents" folder, or could be a folder within your "My Documents". You will want a single location so that you can determine the size of the folder, and therefore determine the size of the Flash drive you will need.
  2. Copy or move all those special files that you want to save into the designated folder.
  3. If you are using the web interface to the school email, there will be no need to back up your email. If you are using a local mail client (such as Thunderbird or Outlook) you may wish to back up your email. (That is beyond the scope of these directions)
  4. Make an "export" of your Bookmarks/Favorites. (Internet Explorer calls them "Favorites", most other browsers such as Firefox and Opera call them "Bookmarks"). Each browser (and even different versions of the same browser) handles the process differently. Save your exported bookmarks to your designated folder.
  5. Once you have collected all your files into your designated folder, check the size of the folder to make sure you Flash drive is large enough. (Or to check what size you will need to go purchase.) Right-click on the folder, then left-click on "Properties". On the General tab of the Properites window, you will see "Size". Note about size: File size is listed as Kilobytes (KB), Megabytes (MB) and Gigabytes(GB). As a general rule of thumb, each is a step of 1,000. So 1GB = 1,000MB and 1MB=1,000KB..
  6. You have all your files in a single location, and you have your Flash drive ready, then you are ready to proceed.

Copying Data to Flash Drive

The instructions outlined here are based on a Windows XP computer. If you have a different version of the Windows operating system, these instructions may not work exactly as they are outlined here.

  1. Insert the Flash drive into a USB port on your computer.
  2. Click Start in the lower-left corner of the computer's desktop.
  3. Click My Computer.
  4. You should see an icon for the Flash drive in the My Computer window.
  5. Resize the My Computer window so that when you open the designated folder, the windows do not overlap each other on the desktop.
  6. Open the designated folder with all your files that you want to back up are located.
  7. Press the UP icon in the menu area, so you are looking at the parent window of you designated folder, and you can see you folder in the window.
  8. Move the mouse cursor over the folder you want to copy and hold down the left-side button on your mouse to select the file or folder icon.
  9. Drag the icon over to the Flash drive icon.
  10. When a small plus sign (+) appears over the Flash drive icon, release the mouse button. A copy of the file or folder will now be copied over to the Flash drive.
  11. To verify that the file or folder has been copied to the drive, double-click the Flash drive icon to open it. The folder that you copied should be listed.
  12. You should also take the Flash drive to another computer (another on in the house, or a friend/family memeber's house) and try to access your files. If you can open your files, then you successfully backed up your data.