Open (My) Documents by double-clicking on it. It will be a drive letter, like E: or F: (unless you have changed it). Look for the Seagate, Maxtor, or Samsung external drive in (My) Computer. Resize it so that it only takes up a portion of your screen. Move the mouse, still holding down the button, and the window corner will move with your mouse. Move your mouse to a corner of the window.Ĭlick and hold down the mouse button, on the corner of the window. If the upper right-hand corner of the window that opens includes this symbol ( ), click it. This exercise can be repeated with one file, many files, one folder, or many folders.įirst, open one window by double-clicking on (My) Computer. Here we will discuss dragging a piece of data from the (My) Documents folder to the external drive.
Here is how to perform those actions on a Windows computer :
(Windows 8 has an additional option called File History. Once it is detected, all you have to do is move data into it. Simply plug in the power, plug in the USB/Firewire/eSATA cable, and the drive should appear in (My) Computer and Windows Explorer almost immediately. In Windows, there is no need to do anything special or additional to make the drive work.
Older external drive’s bundled software may not be supported in Windows 8, Windows 7 or Vista or a newer version of the MacOS.Įvery model of Seagate, Maxtor-brand, and Samsung external drive has a ready-to-use formatting already in place.The user is using the drive for additional storage and has an alternate method of backing up. The drive did not include any bundled backup software. A few examples are:Ī user has lost or uninstalled their software and needs a temporary (or permanent) means of using the external drive to backup data.Ī user's bundled backup software is malfunctioning for a period of time. However, in some cases it is not possible to use such software. Learn how to store and access data on your internal or external drive without the aid of any backup software, using Windows' simple interface.Many, even most, Seagate, Maxtor and Samsung external drives are sold with bundled backup and management software.
Step 2: Find the TrayStatus icon in your system tray, right-click it and choose TrayStatus Settings.
(The latest version, 2.0, includes support for Windows 10.)
Step 1: Download, install and run TrayStatus. For our purposes, however, let's focus on the hard-drive indicator: Thus you can see an system-tray icon light up when you hit, say, Caps Lock or Num Lock. TrayStatus actually offers a number of monitoring features, most of them built around the keyboard. Thankfully, there's a software solution: TrayStatus, a free Windows utility from BinaryFortress. There are other advantages to having a drive-status LED, of course, but precious few modern PCs offer the feature. If there is, it might just be a temporary delay. Somewhere along the way, PC manufacturers decided this wasn't necessary, but I disagree: If your computer is suddenly non-responsive, it can help to know if there's still drive activity. Once upon a time, all desktops and laptops had LEDs that would blink whenever there was hard drive activity.