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Question: How do I back up my computer to flash drive
As a computer user, you may encounter some terrible situations at a time. Your system could crash or fail, the hard drive could be corrupted and not work properly, unknown virus or ransomware could damage or encrypt your data or a software bug could delete your important files.
In this case, it is important to create a backup of your computer to protect your system and data from all the disasters that might happen unexpectedly. At this time, you may want to know: 'How do I back up my computer to a USB flash drive?'.
Where to back up the computer? USB flash drive is recommended
When it comes to backing up the computer, you might find yourself debating where to backup.
Technically, you can back up the computer and save the image files on PC hard drive, an SSD, a regular external hard drive or a USB flash drive. But which one is the best choice?
Here we recommend you to back up the entire computer with Windows system to an external hard drive or USB flash drive. Why is that?
- 1. It allows you to restore your system, data, installed programs or settings to the backup state even your PC cannot boot after an unforeseen disaster.
- 2. USB manufacturers have made USB extremely light with huge capacity and stable performance. USB flash drive seems to be a better choice than an external hard drive.
Next, let's see how to back up your computer system and data to USB flash drive in Windows 10/8/7.
How to back up the computer to USB flash drive in Windows 10/8/7
1. Download Windows backup and recovery software for help
Depending on the importance of the system and data, you can choose to back up your computer to USB flash drive daily, weekly, monthly or just upon an event.
EaseUS Todo Backup, a popular Windows backup and recovery software with scheduled backup option is a nice tool to manage this job. It offers full compatibility with Windows 10/8/7 and other previous Windows versions.
2. USB flash drive with enough storage space
It's necessary to prepare a USB flash drive with enough storage space for saving your computer data and system backup. Usually, 256GB or 512GB is fairly enough for creating a computer backup.
Tutorial: Backup computer to USB flash drive
Step 1. Connect the USB flash drive to PC, launch EaseUS online computer backup software and click 'Disk/Partition Backup'.
Step 2. Choose the source disk you want to backup and select the USB flash drive as the destination disk where you want to save the backup image.
Step 3. Click 'Proceed' to save all the changes and backup computer to USB flash drive.
Note: Here if you don't want to back up the entire computer hard drive, you can choose the right option in step 1 to back up important files with 'File Backup' mode.
2. Back up Windows to USB
If you want to back up Windows system only to a USB flash drive, please follow: back up Windows 10 to USB as a guide to create a system image and prevent unnecessary OS disaster with the help of EaseUS Todo Backup.
If you've switched to the Mac, welcome aboard. Your old external Windows PC drive will work great on the Mac. Apple has built OS X Yosemite and some previous OS X releases with the ability to read from those disks just fine. If you're using such a drive and you'd like to write new data to them, you'll find you can't unless you add new software. Fortunately, you don't have to spend a dime.
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Every week our Peter Cohen brings you Switch to Mac — a column to help you move from Windows PC to the Mac and OS X!
One option is to back up your old Windows external drive (using Time Machine or another method). Reformat the drive using Apple's Disk Utility software and the company's HFS+ file system instead. Then you can restore the backed up data to the drive.Even if the backed up and restored files originally came from a PC, they'll be stored on the drive using a file system the Mac fully understands. That way the drive will be fully Mac-compatible without any need for you to modify the operating system of the Mac to get it to work properly.
Obviously that solution doesn't work for everyone. Maybe the drive you're using has to be used with a PC occasionally. Whatever the case, the good news is that it's not a show-stopper: There are a few utilities out there that will enable Macs to write to mounted NTFS volumes.
Tuxera's NTFS for Mac is one of the best ways to do it. It uses smart caching to keep data transfer as fast as possible and works with every OS X version since 10.4 (Tiger). NTFS for Mac costs $31, and you can download a demo first to see how it does.
Paragon Software's NTFS for Mac 12 is another excellent choice. It includes several additional utilities for people who need to tinker or repair, to enable you to format drives with NTFS, check NTFS partition integrity, fix errors, and more. NTFS for Mac costs $19.95.
If you're a DIYer and you'd like to go the free route, you'll find a Sourceforge project called NativeNTFS-OSX that gets the job done. NativeNTFS isn't for rookies: It's a bash script that needs to run from the Terminal command line and requires you to have root (administrator) access to your computer.
An easier way to go is to download OS X Fuse, a third-party software tool that extends the Mac's file system capabilities. Follow the directions on the OS X Fuse website to download and configure the software. Follow the instructions to download NTFS-3G for Mac OS X, whose development seems stopped right now but still works in Yosemite. Once OS X Fuse and NTFS-3G are installed, your Mac should be able to read and write to NTFS disks just fine.