PC noob questions

Hootsmon

I think my hard drive is on it's way out...

I have a bunch of expensive progs like Sibelius and Band in a box and so on, assuming that the HD lasts a week or so more can my music programs and rest of PC contents be saved to run on a new HD?

I have never backed anything up...

very noobie PC guy

Danny1969

You need to image it to a new harddrive, using something like Ghost or drive image. That will avoid re licensing all software and such and the pain of loading the OS \ drivers and programs from scratch 

Hootsmon

Thanks D 

revsorg

What size is your hard drive and how much is filled with data?  We have swapped all the original hard drives in our computers over to Samsung SSDs as they are much faster. 

Myranda

Had a kid come to my help desk the other days because a drive "might be dying" by which he meant "is totally dead, doesn't work" somehow expecting I'd have some sort of make-it-better button.

Drives wear out and fail. Back yours up as soon as possible. And keep copies of important stuff. Even a couple of copies on the same drive can help against bad sectors but redundancy is not always a bad thing for data... family photos stored on your drive for instance could be lost forever, so keep a spare elsewhere 

crunchman

Software can normally be reinstalled (sometimes at a cost) but as @Myranda says it's things like family photos that are irreplaceable.

I actually have 2 portable hard drives.  All the photos are on both, as well as at least one PC.  The recent ones are still on the phones as well.

You have reminded me I need to do a back up.  Thanks.