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Windows 8.1
I loaded Windows 8.1 on my Inspiron 660 yesterday only to find out to do the Dell Backup & Recovery you need a USB drive 100GB or better. I already bought a 16gb flash drive for the original windows 8 and now I have to buy a external hard drive. The cheapest I found was a 500GB for $50. Why can't they put it back the other way, it says it only talks about 7 or 8GB of memory for the backup. It says you can use it for other purposes but if you already have an external one for your own backup, it wants to erase everything first. Any suggestions. I wanted to write Dell direct and just ask them about it but you really can't find a place to do it.
Thanks, Bob
Mary G
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December 8th, 2013 11:00
Dell's free backup program does not allow full backup on an external hard drive. Only the paid version can do that. Use windows recovery program instead.
Only the system image needs an external hard drive. You can make a repair/recovery flash drive using a 16gb flash drive. Do Not use an external hard drive for a repair boot disk since it wipes the whole drive. A bootable repair flash drive allows you to access the restore partition on the hard drive or the system image on an external hard drive. Think of it as boot disk to start the computer when disaster strikes. Use an external hard drive for File History and manual backups to use in case the hard drive in the computer fails.
Look up Recovery in windows Help and Support to see how to Create a usb Recovery Disk.
rpealit
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December 8th, 2013 13:00
Thank you very much, I just did what you said and it work. Before I got your e-mail I thought about a new small 1T usb drive I bought to transfer pictures from my laptop to the desktop. I only had a few folders in there to I transferred them to the desktop and did the recovery disk the way Dell had me do it. It make a separate partition I think on there, As there are two disk drives on it now.Then I transferred the files back. So I guess I now have two backups I can use.
pabman
10 Posts
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December 9th, 2013 23:00
Yes .
Try the Windows built-in one or the third-party one