For Seniors: Back Up Files to a Laptop's CD/DVD Drive
Make backups (copies) of important files on your Windows laptop onto a CD or DVD, in case it gets lost or damaged. The backup files on the CD/DVD can then be used instead of the originals you no longer have. You never want to think about your laptop getting damaged or lost, but having backups safely stored on a CD or DVD disc helps if it does.
If your laptop doesn’t have a CD/DVD drive built in, you’ll have to purchase an external CD/DVD drive and connect it to your laptop to perform these steps.
Place a blank writable CD-R/RW (read/writable) or DVD-R/RW in your CD-RW or DVD-RW drive and then choose Start→Documents.
The Documents window appears, listing the files in the Documents folder.
Select all the files that you want to copy to disc.
You can select a group of files or folders to compress if you want. Click the first file or folder in the list, press and hold Shift and click the final item. To select nonconsecutive items, press the Ctrl key and click each item.
If you want to back up the entire contents of a folder, such as the Document folder, you can just click the Documents folder instead of selecting files.
Right-click the files that you selected and then choose Copy to Folder.
The Copy Items dialog box appears.
Click the CD-R/RW or DVD-RW drive from the list on the left, and click Copy.
The files are copied to the CD or DVD disc. When it's finished, click the Close button to close the Document window.
You can also back up to a network or another drive by using the Back Up Your Computer link in the Control Panel. Using Windows Backup, you can make settings to regularly back up to a local disk or CD-R/RW/DVD drive, or to a network.
Backing up to a CD/DVD is a little different from burning a disc: After you back up your files, then later changes are saved only each subsequent time a backup is run.
