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General discussion

Backup Screwup

Sep 27, 2008 6:55PM PDT

Gateway laptop-MT6920
Windows Vista Home Premium

I Very new at all this stuff.
I don't know much of the terminology.

I tried to follow the instructions given but screwed up somewhere while trying to backup files and folders to the 'D' drive (what ever that is). I got a popup saying that it didn't have enough space to finish.
Now I get a popup that informs me that I'm low on disc space every time i boot up. Can I undo that backup?
A restore didn't fix it.

Discussion is locked

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Backup Bis
Sep 29, 2008 6:50AM PDT

It's hard to say what the d:\ is on your particular machine, but I would say it's located on your hard drive, in which case your backup set landed there. In other words, you have filled up your hard drive already! You'll have to open Windows Explorer and then open the d drive from there. You can find Explorer by going to Start and click on All Programs. It's in the menu that pops up from there. On many PC's, the D drive is the CD-DVD drive, but it looks like your machine is set up differently. Be careful of where things are going when you copy or move or download stuff. Files (and this includes backup sets) can get lost forever on a computor's hard drive. On Vista, the Search function is right above the Start button. You may need it!

As a rule, send backup files to an external drive. They're not that expensive. Because, if your hard drive crashes with all your backup files there, everything gets trashed and you're totally out of luck.

When you find your d:\, CAREFULLY check the contents and if they're just all those backup files, delete them, because your machine may not operate well at all with a hard drive that is packed to the brim.

It might be a good idea to call your vendor on this issue b/4 you start deleting anything, however.

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Backup Screwup
Sep 30, 2008 1:28AM PDT

Problem solved by Gateway.

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Maybe D is a recovery partition on you hard drive.
Sep 29, 2008 12:43PM PDT

Go to control panel, computer and see if it shows up there. If so, that is strictly for recovery and nothing can be backed up on it.
External hard drives are very cheap now and that is a good way to back your computer up.
Vista has Backup and restore center in the control panel which makes it very easy to setup for either manual backup or auto backup.