Backup and Recovery

Larry's sister had her hard drive fail. Her backup isn't responding and it seems like her hard drive may be "locked." Leo says that doesn't make sense at all. If she made an image of the drive, she should be able to blast it onto another drive pretty easily, and Acronis should handle it. And unless she was locking her drive before, there's no reason it would be locked now. So more likely, if the recovery failed, then it could have messed up her SSD because the installation didn't finish. Leo recommends getting a new copy of Windows and format and reinstall.

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.