Backup and Recovery

Vicky put her computer to sleep and now it won't wake up. Leo says that's often called "the Big Sleep," and is a common Windows problem. It sounds like Vicky is experiencing "sudden death" of her hard drive. If she can put it into another computer through the external USB plug, and she can see the drive, that means it's not dead. If it can't see it, she will know it's dead. If it can see it, then she can try booting up from it. She'll probably have to change the boot order to do it, but there's a keyboard command for that after she sees the Dell Logo.

Robert has been backing up on Carbonite, and it's a good thing because his computer recently "melted down." So he's going to be restoring his backup from Carbonite to a new Dell computer. Will he get data back to the exact same file structure that he had on his original computer? Leo says it should be backed up exactly the way he had it set up. It also pays to verify it from time to time just to be sure. He can also do it with Carbonite's restore utility, or just drag and drop individual files over.

John can't find his phone, and he can't see it through Google's location service. He also can't get into his account because he's lost the recovery codes. Leo also recommends going to the Google "I'm Having Trouble Logging in Page" and answer all the challenge questions. Then he'll be able to recover his account and get a new code.

Don wants to know why he needs to back up his photos to the cloud and what should he use? Leo says backing up to the cloud is vital because if the computer hard drive fails, or the computer dies, you still have that data. Leo recommends a 3-2-1 strategy. Three copies, two formats, one off site. OneDrive and Carbonite are good, but you have to have it all in one folder, and OneDrive has a backup limit of 1TB which should be enough. Leo also has all his photos upload to Google Photos. Unlimited high-quality storage!