Externe can't boot his laptop from a CD or a flash drive. He asked the Answer Line forum for help.

When you turn on a PC, you usually want and expect it to check the hard drive or SSD and, from there, load Windows or another operating system. But occasionally you need to boot into an alternative environment that isn't on your hard drive. You might, for instance, need to install an operating system or scan for malware from inside a clean environment. That's when you need to boot from a CD, DVD, or flash drive.

For more on why you might want to do this, see Boot discs explained: An overview of booting your PC from something other than your hard drive. For what to do when your PC won't boot this way, read on.

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Just a few short years ago, cloud storage services that synced files and folders across multiple PCs and mobile devices were just a dream. But thanks to the rapid rise of entities like Dropbox, SugarSync, and Google Drive, cloud storage and syncing services are nearly ubiquitous today, acting as hard drives in the sky that help you do all kinds of things—such as creating a bulletproof (almost) backup system or turbocharging your productivity to blistering new levels—no matter where you are.

If you have the space, that is. Truly wondrous setups require robust cloud storage capabilities, but that doesn’t mean you have to drop dollars for extra gigs.

Most services offer free accounts with modest quantities of complimentary cloud storage. In isolation, these pittances don’t amount to much, but merged into Voltron-like unity, the free storage from several services can achieve mammoth totals. With some patience, you can build your own supercloud with more than 100GB of free storage. With a lot of patience (and pestering of your pals), you can nab more than 225GB. And all that online storage is free-as-in-free-beer free.

Here’s how to do it, along with some tips on how to manage your storage hoard to take advantage of each service’s unique properties.

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There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who have lost critical data, and those who will. In other words, if you use technology long enough and neglect to back up your data, you’re guaranteed to have at least one extremely bad day. Whether it’s theft, loss, fire, flood, corruption, or some form of malware, a single incident can destroy the lion’s share of your family photos, personal documents, address books, years-in-the-making music library, and more.

The solution, of course, is to back up everything. You probably know how to purchase an external hard drive and plug it in to your computer to make regular full-system backups, but that can be an inconvenient, time-consuming task. What’s more, that drive is vulnerable in the face of fire or burglary.

Backing up to the cloud—for fee or for free

That’s why many users turn to the cloud, relying on services like Carbonite and MozyHome to archive their critical data. These are good solutions, but they’ll cost you. Carbonite, for example, charges $59 per year per computer. If you want protection for yourself, your spouse, and maybe a couple of kids, you’re looking at a potentially hefty annual bill.

Thankfully, you have other options for making backups. If you’re willing to spend a little extra time, you can protect all your data—both locally and in the cloud—without spending a dime. The key is creating what I call a diversified backup: One that puts different kinds of data in different places.

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Computers may have become a lot more user-friendly over the past decade, but they’re still far from perfect—PCs require a certain amount of configuration and maintenance to operate at their full potential. Unfortunately, because we humans are also far from perfect, we frequently don’t put in the work we should, and we end up with a slower, sloppier, less secure machine as a result.

No more excuses! Whipping your PC into the best shape it can be requires but a dozen simple tasks. None are complicated, most take a matter of minutes, and all will have a major effect on how well your computer works for you. Even better, by the time you’re finished you’ll never have to worry about doing many of these tasks again.

Clean the case, keys, and display

The first task is the most basic: Are you keeping your computer clean? It’s not just important because a dirty PC looks gross, or is less pleasant to use. Simply put, a clean computer can last longer. Dirt and dust buildup in and around your computer can clog the fans and air intakes, causing your hardware to run hotter, which lowers its expected life span. So if your PC is looking a little musty, take the time to clean it.

Photograph by Robert Cardin

To do so, you need to have only a few things on hand: a Phillips-head screwdriver, a can of compressed air, paper towels, and rubbing alcohol.

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Eugene Bartley wanted to know if his files would eventually disappear from a cloud-based backup service.

Cloud-based backup services, such as Mozy, Carbonite, and IDrive, upload your files to their servers as protection against your losing the originals. This has some big advantages over a local backup. Once set up they're completely automatic. And it's extremely unlikely that the same fire or flood will destroy your computer and your backup.

But there are disadvantages, as well. One is that you lose physical control of your backup. Those files could be destroyed because of someone else's corporate decision.

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If you have a hard drive that is quickly approaching capacity, sorting through the files and folders for the ones taking up the most space can be a really time-consuming process. There’s an easier way to do it—it’s the subject of our latest Tech Tip.

For help identifying space hogs, let’s turn to TreeSize Free, which is available for Windows 8, as well as Windows 7, Vista, and XP. Launch the program, go to scan, and select the drive you want to take a look at. The application shows you, in gigabytes, megabytes, and kilobytes, how big each folder is, ranked from most to least.

One of the nice things you can do with TreeSize Free is drill down into subfolders to see what sort of space is being taken up. If I want to right click on a folder and see what the files are like or delete them, I can go ahead and do that.

Note that TreeSize Free does not dynamically update, so after you delete the data you’ll have to run the scan again to get an accurate count of files and data being stored.

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Felix Luke needs to back up his entire hard drive. He asked me to explain the differences between cloning and imaging.

Both cloning and imaging create an exact record of your drive or partition. I'm not just talking about the files, but the master boot record, allocation table, and everything else needed to boot and run your operating system.

This isn't necessary for protecting your data--a simple file backup will handle that job just fine. But should your hard drive crash or Windows become hopelessly corrupt, a clone or image backup can quickly get you back to work.

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In a previous article, I briefly explained why you shouldn't back up to a second internal drive. Mike Bell wanted a more detailed explanation.

That earlier article, My PC doesn't see the new, second hard drive, wasn't actually about backup. I devoted two sentences to the subject in hopes of steering readers away from a dangerous practice. Mike wasn't the only person whom I left wondering. My apologies.

Here's a more complete answer:

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Stevey, admitted confused by the benefits of RAIDs, asked the Answer Line forum to explain these hard drive groups.

A Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) puts multiple hard drives together to improve on what a single drive can do on its own. Depending on how you configure a RAID, it can increase your computer's speed while giving you a single "drive" that can hold as much as all of the drives combined. Or you can use a RAID to increase reliability, so that your computer will keep working after a hard drive crash. Some RAIDS allow you to do both.

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Here are three of the most popular RAID configurations:

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Reader Kristie wrote in with this puzzler:

"I just found a shoebox full of 3.5-inch disks. I think they were from my old digital camera, but I have no way of finding out because I no longer have a computer (or camera) that can read them. What can I do?"

Talk about a trip down memory lane! I haven't so much as laid eyes on a 3.5-inch "floppy" in years, and I'd forgotten that a few early digital cameras did indeed storage images on that kind of media.

Needless to say, however, modern PCs don't have floppy drives. (Same goes for not-so-modern ones.) So how can you hope to extract your photos, WordPerfect documents, and any other old data that might be lingering on those disks?

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PoloTiger has both a solid state drive and a hard drive, and the SSD is almost full. What's the best way to both move data files to the hard drive and make Windows understand that that's where they belong?

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You're doing the right thing. To my mind, putting Windows and your programs on an SSD, and your data files on a traditional hard drive, gives you the best balance of speed and storage space. See The Best of Both Worlds: An SSD and a HDD for details.

But that earlier article failed to address how to move your documents, music, and other data files to the hard drive. I'm making up for that here.

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Lyman E Bertsch needs to run an application on a relative's computer. Installing the program isn't an option. Can Lyman run the program off a flash drive?

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Probably not. But you may be able to find another program that does the same thing, but that you can run off a flash drive.

We call these programs portable, because they can be easily moved between computers and don't need to be installed. You can carry these on a portable storage device, such as a flash drive, and run them on any Windows PC. And you would be amazed how much portable software is out there.

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Problem: Your hard drive is getting full.

Solution: Delete unnecessary data to make more room.

Easy enough, right? Actually, it's not always easy to find the files and folders that are using the most space on your drive. In fact, it can be downright complicated and time-consuming.

Free disk-space analyzer WizTree quickly scans your drive and shows you the names and locations of your largest files, which can help if you're trying to root out and delete "fat" data.

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Cyberknight asked the Hard Drives, NAS Drives, Storage forum if a new flash drive should be formatted in FAT32 or NTFS.

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First, FAT32 pretty much guarantees that your drive will work with any computer you plug it into. To my knowledge, every computer and operating system released since the invention of the USB drive supports FAT32. I would be inclined to go with FAT32 for a flash drive, but NTFS for an external hard drive. Here's why:

Virtually every operating systgem modern enough to supporft USB ports can read and write FAT32. That's not the case with NTFS. For instance, you need a third-party utility to write to an NTFS drive on the Mac. Believe me, you don't want to install software on your friend's Mac (or the library's).

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Windows 8 includes a ton of great new features that are easy to overlook amidst the sturm und drang over the Start screen. Meet Storage Spaces, a new Windows utility that allows you to connect multiple data storage devices (internal and external) that rely on different interfaces (SATA hard drives, USB flash drives, and Serial Attached SCSI drives, for example) to your PC and treat them as a single giant storehouse dubbed your “storage pool.”

You can divide that pool into spaces with names like ‘My Movie Space’ or ‘Jane’s Spreadsheets’ that function exactly like traditional formatted Windows directories. In fact, it isn’t entirely accurate to describe your motley crew of heterogeneous hard drives as a pool; the spaces in Storage Spaces are actually formatted with a unique file system that renders all incorporated hard drives inaccessible to Windows proper.

That’s because the spaces in Windows 8 Storage Spaces are designed to mirror the data stored in them to other drives in the pool, so you can safeguard your data against the threat of drive failure without having to pay for and maintain dedicated RAID drives. Though the Storage Spaces arrangement isn’t foolproof, it greatly increases the likelihood that—if one or more drives in your pool fail—a copy of your data will remain available (or be reconstructable) from one or more of the other drives in the pool. Storage Spaces gives you a handy way to manage large pools of data, especially ones that will gradually expand over time (such as family photo albums or movie collections).

Building your first pool

To create a new pool, first make sure that all of the storage devices you want to include are connected to your PC; then open your Windows 8 Control Panel by pressing your Windows key, typing control panel, and pressing Enter. Select the Storage Spaces option from the Control Panel, and select Create a new pool and storage space.

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Nick248 asked the Answer Line forum about optical drives. I figured it was time to go over the various types of CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs, and the drives that read and write to them.

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I can't blame anyone for being confused. We've got three types of optical discs (CDs, DVDs, and BDs), with five different capacities between them. There are discs you can only read from, discs you can also write to, and discs you can write to, erase, and write to again. And the acronyms aren't always helpful.

Let's start with the acronym that appears before the hyphen, which tells you the standardized disc format:

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Zeterjons asked the Utilities forum how to rescue files off of a physically crashed hard drive, while making sure that other files on that hard drive are destroyed beyond rescue.

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I'll give you some advice for recovering and destroying the appropriate files, but I don't think you're going to like it. It may not work, and if it does, you'll have to pay a lot of money for it.

But first, let me point out that you got yourself into this situation. If you had backed up all of your files, and encrypted the sensitive ones, all you'd have to do now is buy and install a new hard drive.

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Technical terms can get overwhelming, especially when they include too many TLAs (three-letter acronyms). Even people who use these terms sometimes need to step back and remember what they're talking about.

So here are some of the most common labels for the technologies used to store data inside your computer:

HDD: Hard disk drive. A magnetic, mechanical device that's been the primary internal storage device for more than a quarter century.

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What is a RAM disk? The name says it all: A RAM disk is a virtual hard drive stored in your computer's RAM. Creating a RAM disk requires dedicated software and utilizes a chunk of your system's available memory; though a RAM disk appears as just another drive on your PC, the RAM that you use for the RAM disk is unavailable for general memory tasks.

Why would you want to use memory as a makeshift hard drive? Speed, pure and simple. RAM is insanely fast compared with traditional storage, as you can see in the above screenshot comparing benchmarks from a 7200-rpm hard drive (left) and a RAM disk created with Dataram's RAMDisk utility (right).

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That's true whether you have a gigantic hard drive quickly filling up with applications, movies, music, and photos or live with one of the newer ultrathin laptops sporting fast but tiny solid-state drives that can’t hold much to begin with.

Thankfully, lots of easy ways exist to reclaim hard-drive space and keep the dreaded “out-of-disk-space” warnings away. Let's check some of them out.

Clean Up Files You No Longer Need

The first step is to get rid of the common space-hogging culprits. These include unnecessary applications and a variety of useless system files.

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Microsoft's newly updated SkyDrive is pretty cool, offering cloud-based storage that's comparable to Dropbox. In fact, some would argue that SkyDrive is even better than Dropbox.

But there's one thing about it I don't like: Any desktop folder you want to synchronize must be moved to the SkyDrive folder, and that can cause problems.

For example, for years I've kept all my music in a folder called MP3s. iTunes, Carbonite, and a couple other programs are linked to that folder, meaning if I relocate it to SkyDrive, I'll have to redirect those programs, rebuild libraries, redo backups, and so on.

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Many technologies originally intended for the enterprise end up trickling down into the consumer market at some point. Some of these technologies (ethernet or virtualization, for instance) are more practical than others; but if businesses find a use for a specific piece of technology, then chances are good that consumers can benefit from it as well. Such is the case with iSCSI.

iSCSI stands for Internet Small Computer System Interface. SCSI (sans i) has long served to connect a variety of peripherals to computer systems, but most commonly it appears in storage devices, such as hard drives or tape-backup drives. iSCSI builds upon the base technology by allowing users to connect to a remote storage volume over a network, as if said storage volume were a locally attached disk. Simply put, iSCSI transmits SCSI commands over IP (Internet Protocol) networks. iSCSI is like a virtual SATA (or SCSI) cable, in that it uses a network connection to link a system and a storage volume.

Judging from that description, you may be wondering how iSCSI differs from any other network share with a mapped drive letter. On many levels, the end results are similar. With iSCSI, though, the attached volume appears to the operating system as a locally attached, block storage device that you can format with the file system of your choice. In addition, fewer layers of abstraction separate an iSCSI volume and your PC, which can result in increased performance.

Ready to get your hands dirty with some hardware? If you wish to use iSCSI, there are two main requirements: a network-attached storage device or server with a volume that can be configured as an iSCSI target, and an iSCSI initiator, which allows a system to connect to the target.

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You could e-recycle it--hand it off to a responsible company that will dismantle it and recycle the parts--but what do you gain from that aside from feeling good about being environmentally responsible? Allow us to suggest another solution: Repurpose the old hulk as a local server. You can use it as a repository for automatic PC backups, or set it up as a file server that you and your employees can access while you're on the road. Those are just two of the roles that an older PC can perform that are of far more benefit to your business than having the machine collect dust or head for the dump.

Best of all, the software--FreeNAS--that will power this machine is exactly what its name describes: a free operating system for network-attached storage. And side from being free, FreeNAS is easy to install, configure, and run. You'll find everything you need to know in this guide.

Installing FreeNAS

Before you begin your FreeNAS installation, obtain a USB thumb drive with a capacity of at least 2GB. You'll install FreeNAS to this drive and boot from it, because you can't run the OS on the same drive that you're using to share files from. Alternatively, you can buy a very small solid-state drive, install FreeNAS on that, and boot the server from it; but investing in such an SSD is an unnecessary expense (unless you're worried that someone might remove the USB drive without realizing the consequences).

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Why is [Program X] always running when I start my PC?

Windows maintains a list of programs that automatically run every time you boot up your computer. Some of these startup programs (such as antivirus utilities) are beneficial, but many of them are not necessary and can slow your PC as they run automatically in the background. Speed up your boot time by disabling Windows startup programs.

Why does my PC keep making a grinding sound?

This can happen for a lot of reasons--and unfortunately almost all of them are bad news. The most likely answer is that a fan or hard drive in your PC is starting to die, causing it to spin off-kilter. PCWorld contributing editor Lincoln Spector wrote a smart guide to pinpointing the source of a grinding-sound problem in this Answer Line column. No matter what the cause turns out to be, you should immediately back up your hard drive, just in case.

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Back when hard drives were less capacious and more expensive, RAID was created to combine multiple, less-expensive drives into a single, higher-capacity and/or faster volume. On top of that, it was designed to facilitate redundancy, also known as fault tolerance or failover protection, so that the array and its data remain usable when a drive fails. You'll often hear about 1-disk or 2-disk redundancy, which refers to the number of drives that can fail while the array remains viable.

Redundancy is important for a small business, as drive failure does happen. RAID's data redundancy offers no protection against data lost to malware, theft, or natural disaster--and it's certainly no substitute for proper backup practices--but it does provide a fail-safe against hardware failure.

RAID has levels, or methods by which the drives are ganged together; commonly people refer to levels by number. The three most common levels in the consumer and small-office markets are RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 5. However, you'll encounter numerous other options too, including levels 6, 10, 5+1, JBOD ("just a bunch of disks"), and Microsoft's virtual disk RAID, as well as abstracted RAID implementations such as Drobo BeyondRAID, Netgear X-RAID, and Synology SHR.

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No more. Starting now, you can drag a file from your desktop directly to Dropbox on the Web. No more clicking the upload button, navigating your folders for the file(s) you want, and all that.

In case you've been living under a rock, Dropbox is the cloud-based storage service that easily and automatically syncs files between PCs, portable devices, and the Web. It's insanely popular, and with good reason.

You can get a 2GB Dropbox account free of charge. If you're willing to refer friends (who in turn sign up for their own Dropbox accounts), you can score as much as 16GB of bonus free storage.

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When Windows tells you that you can't safely remove a flash drive or other external storage media, it asks you to "Close any programs or windows that might be using the device, and then try again."

That's good advice, and the first thing you should do is follow it. Examine your taskbar and

If that doesn't work, you might try closing programs that were reading files off the drive. I've opened a Word file off a flash drive, closed the file, and then discovered that I had to close Word entirely to remove the drive.

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So, your business has grown large enough that you need your first server. Congratulations! Acquiring a server is a big decision, so some trepidation is understandable. This guide will explain the basic principles of the technology, help you decide which class of server will best fit your needs, and give you some ballpark pricing, so you don’t overspend or acquire a product that’s insufficient for your needs.

I’ll also explore the chief alternative to running your own server--relying on the cloud--and provide a primer on one of today’s hottest server trends: virtualization. You’ll find this guide useful even if you ultimately decide to hire an IT consultant to analyze your requirements and make a purchase recommendation.

Server Basics

Although a small server might look no different from a high-end desktop PC, the machines are designed for very different tasks. A desktop computer is designed for one person who needs a user-friendly operating system to run desktop applications such as a word processor, a spreadsheet, an email client, and a Web browser. A server runs a specialized operating system designed to support many users. It’s engineered to run multiuser applications such as email, messaging, and print servers; shared calendar programs; databases; and enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management software.

A server also makes it easy for your employees to share data and collaborate, since it operates as a central repository for all of your documents, images, contacts, and other important files. It can host a company intranet, for sharing information with your employees quickly and economically. Set up a virtual private network, and you and your employees can access the data on the server remotely from anywhere you have Internet access. On top of that, a server can automatically back up your desktop and laptop systems, so you’ll never lose critical data if one machine fails or is lost or stolen. Servers are designed to be reliable, secure, and fault-tolerant, with redundant storage options. If you expect your business to expand, choose a server that’s scalable and can grow with you.

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Solid-state drives (SSDs) are an increasingly popular choice for businesses looking for faster performance and lower power consumption than magnetic hard-disk drives can provide. As SSDs continue to slowly fall in price and improve in performance, businesses are implementing SSDs across server farms, laptops, and desktops.

Data center have a number of ways to use SSDs: in conjunction with other storage, as cache, or as a tier zero--the best and fastest level of storage you have available. That way, the most-used files can be stored on SSDs, relegating less-accessed files to slower media. In enterprise storage, you can find all-SSD systems as well as those with SSDs used alongside older, rotating media.

SSD capacity is growing, but still carries a high cost per gigabyte compared with hard drives. Where can you get the best use of SSDs? Here are some answers.

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Driven by an insatiable thirst for more storage capacity, the capabilities of network attached storage (NAS) appliances have been improving by leaps and bounds. Their prices have also fallen substantially, with a basic two-bay NAS chassis available for as little as a couple of hundred dollars—a far cry from the thousands they used to cost. Their affordability represents a huge opportunity for small and mid-sized businesses (SMB), which now find it possible to host multiple terabytes of data on their network at a fraction of the cost of a traditional file server or storage area network (SAN).

NAS Hardware

When buying a new NAS systems, the first question will obviously be centered on the projected storage capacity that will be required, which is closely related to the number of supported hard disk drives (HDD). Note that some NAS options may be upgradable with an expansion chassis for additional drive bays. Also, be on the lookout for support of external storage devices using USB or eSATA ports, which may be useful as a temporary capacity fix, or for the purpose of performing a backup. (See "Data Backup and Synchronization" below.)

Do remember to ensure that the NAS is capable of supporting the largest capacity HDD currently available, which would be 3TB for a 3.5-inch SATA HDD at the time of writing. Some NAS appliances are compatible with both 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch form factors, though the latter may be of limited utility unless there are plans to deploy solid state drives (SSD). HDD should also be hot swappable for maximum flexibility, though today only the most basic models NAS do not support this feature.

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