[RESOLVED] Use of a Thumb Drive for backup of C:

I am considering buying the HP 32GB thumb drive ($23) from Newegg Shell Shocker 3-6PM PT today. Am hoping that it may hold the contents of my C: drive which I would hope to use for backup purposes but I do not know if it will. How can I know the size of what is presently stored on my C drive on my windows 7 machine? I feel as though that I should know the answer but I want to be sure, otherwise I have no need for such a thumb drive. The price is very reasonable and you may be in need of this flash drive. As usual, TIA.

Right-click on the C: drive in Windows Explorer, select Properties. NOte that if you wanted to image the C: drive using Acronis, you could compress the image file to reduce the size of it by maybe 25-35%.

32GB sounds pretty small for a backup of C: unless it's just the base Windows. Once you start adding apps, it'll get pretty big. I'd probably go with an external hard drive for backups rather than a flash drive.

Flash drives are slower than external hard drives, so that's a consideration as well.

Thanks to both of you for replying. While I do not have a lot of items saved to my hard drive, I also questioned the size of my stored info and including the win7 app. I do use Acronis Home 2010 as my preferred backup to an external USB drive and I have a current backup on that drive. I strongly suspect that I will accept your suggestions and react accordingly.

Be aware that you are likely to die of old age while transferring that amount of data to a USB drive :eek: They are OK for occasional use, or archiving, etc., but USB drives are a bit of a disaster for regular backup use. I found that out the hard way :(