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General discussion

Clickfree restoring

Mar 6, 2011 3:09AM PST

Anyone, I have backed up everything on my desktop to my clickfree. Now,I would like to reload my entire operating system. Will my clickfree recognize my desktop after the reload?

Discussion is locked

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Re: clickfree
Mar 6, 2011 3:22AM PST

Your clickfree seems to come in three flavours: deluxe, basic and traveller. The first one uses encryption, and might give a problem to read your backed up data after reloading the OS. The last 2 should work, I think.

Curiously enough, their website only talks about backup and never about restore. That's an essential part of any backup solution. So to be sure I would use the phone support mentioned at http://www.clickfree.com/

There are tragic stories here in the forum of people backing up everything to an external hard drive to reload there OS, only to learn that external drive failed at the critical moment (that's Murphy's law), so they lost everything despite having made a backup. So we recommend you backup your backup to another PC first. If that works, it should also work after reformattting on this PC. Kind of a pilot run.

Kees

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Still save critical files, regardless
Mar 7, 2011 12:32AM PST

You truly need to read any manual provided or check what will do. I did a quick surf and found oddly the CNET review:

http://reviews.cnet.com/external-hard-drives/clickfree-c2n-500gb/4505-3190_7-34026569.html

Note, that this model didn't support a full backup, meaning *all* files. You can't have the recovery or OS install discs? If not, make them if you haven't already or get them from the maker if still provided for your model#. If your PC is an older model, some websites offer OS recovery/restore discs. You will still need to backup your data outside of the OS. This is where your Clickfree comes in.

tada -----Willy Happy