ive formatted my external HDD and and to get all my information on it estimates download time 24 hours, is this a 1 off ?? and then it says i need to save on a floppy at the end ?? is that right and how often do i need to do that back up, i got the hard drive as got got fed up losing important data from viruses and was advised to back up everyday to save my data if i got anymore viruses

I don't know the particulars of Microsoft's built in back-up program, but you shouldn't have to have a floppy at the end of it unless it wants to create a boot disk for you to reimage your hard drive with. However, that's a pretty advanced feature and I doubt that it would be included for free in an O.S.

I've used Acronis True Image before and have been extremely impressed with it. It allows you incremental back-ups, rather than writing over the previous image. If Microsoft's built in utility doesn't offer incremental back-ups, you're going to have to image your original drive every couple of days or even once a week depending on how important the stuff is on it and how often you add stuff. For example, if it's a computer containing business related items, it is more important to back it up more frequently than if it's simply a computer used to play games and surf the internet. The more frequently you do total back-ups(complete reimagings), the more stress you put on the drive and the sooner it will fail.

While Microsoft's estimated time to finished is notoriously bad, 24 hours is a super long time for it to take. Based on an average of 15 MB/s, that equals out to 1,3 Terabytes (1 300 GB). You must really have a lot to back up!

Another thing you may want to look into is getting a largeish thumbdrive for saving your personal files on. If you get one with a neck lanyard, it should be harder to lose.

Which brings me to my final point. Anytime you put data on a secondary drive you double the chance that it could be compromised. That's something you will want to keep in mind.

Get a proper backup program.

You can estimate about 7MB/s on average for a USB enclosure, so 80,000 MB should take... about 3 hours.

daveboo: 15MB/s is very optimistic, I have never seen any of my systems sustain that on testing between windows, OS X, and about 5 different enclosures. You can get this when transferring large files, but lots of small files are way more inefficient, with transfer rates easily dropping below 1MB/s. I always have a program running that shows me the current read/write speeds.