HP Expert Day - How to Prepare for System Backup and Recovery

This live, how-to video hosted by HP Experts explains why to back up, how to back up, how to recover your PC, and support topics related to issues people have performing these processes.

For other helpful videos go to hp.com/supportvideos or youtube.com/hpprintersupport.

More support options for your printer are available at hp.com/support.

This video was produced by HP.

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Closed Caption:

Hi. This is Jason from HP Customer Care.
I want to welcome you to our how-to video series
that we are holding in conjunction with our HP Expert Day
that is happening today, May 14.
I have brought a few experts along with me.
I have Bill, Randy, and Kevin.
We are going to talk about system recovery, system refresh,
system restore. Basicly the different things you can do if your system is not working
the way you are expecting it to
and the different things you can try to recover it and make it better.
If you have a question, feel free to ask us
in the comments field in the YouTube stream.
Otherwise, if you have access to Twitter,
you can tweet your questions to #hpexpertday.
If you are looking for information on a different subject,
be sure to join the conversation that is taking place on our consumer support forums
at hp.com/expertday.
I want to welcome you. Thanks for joining.
I have had experience as a computer owner
of having that uncomfortable situation
where things are not working right,
you feel like you have tried everything,
and now you are going to have to try to restore your computer
or recover it to a previous state.
It is one of the more scary things that can happen as a computer owner.
Hopefully, today we can demystify some of the options.
There are a lot of options out there.when you can get the situation
We should start off with backing up and some simple ways to do that.
When we are talking about saving your computer
and it is not working right,
it is all about the up front preparation
so that you do not get to a spot where you cannot save yourself.
It is all abour preparation
and backing up your files up front.
If you have ever lost family photos,
you know that backup is life or death at your house.
I still have not lived down when I learned to back up the hard way.
You lose it for real when it is gone.
So, having another system, having another hard drive,
backing up is something that you do before you recover.
It is not necessarily part of the recover and restore.
I think we agree on the importance. There is a lot of information on the web.
You can find out about backing up. One of the easiest ways is to buy a hard drive.
And using one of the multitude of programs that allow you to do that.
We are not going to go deep on backing up today,
other than to say that you should definitely do it.
And you will see it come up.
You will see the backup options come up
because HP tries to help you before you go down each step,
saying that you should really do this backup.
We are mentioning it now because it is something you want to do before
you do these options.
You mentioned preparation.
One of the things that was different for me when I recently bought a PC
is that it did not come with those disks.
I seem to remember back in the day,
your computer always came with a set of disks that, if you ever got in trouble,
they allowed you to restore your computer to factory settings.
In this case, it is on my hard drive in a separate area,
and it would ask me now and then if I wanted to make a backup.
I have to admit that I would usually say, "Delay"
or "Later" or "Not Now."
That is very common.
I see you brought some that look like they were made here.
Can you talk to me about that?
If I have it on my computer, why would I need disks?
What would the point of that be?
The biggest reason is . . . why you make a recovery disk,
is to recover your PC from a catastrophic failure.
Your hard drive could be that point of catastrophic failure.
So, if your hard drive dies,
your recovery partitian, or that part of your hard drive
that has the recovery data on it, is gone too.
It is about survival.
Sometimes you need other items. It may not seem important now,
but when you run into a specific situation like your hard drive is dead
or you put in a new hard drive,
that is the only thing that is going to save you.
It may not seem so important when you are clicking "Delay,"
but if your computer dies the next day,
you are going to think, "Ah, man. Why did I not do that?"
A lot of the hard drives today are mechanical,
they spin -- they are amazing devices--
but they will eventually die out because they are mechanical.
We have talked about some of the precautionary stuff.
Backing up. Creating recovery media.
One of the things that I think about is . . .
Usually something is really wrong with my computer
when I am to that point where I want to refresh it or restart it
back to original settings.
When you talk to people about this, there is the fear of losing all their data.
In the case where somebody did not back up,
what are some steps we can take to repair the symptoms we are having?
With the least amount of impact.
It depends on the situation.
If you are just getting an annoying error message when using a particular software,
then it is probably that one particular piece of software.
It may not be compatible with some other piece of your system.
You may just have to uninstall it and reinstall it.
Usually the tools that I use, in this order, would be,
do a Microsoft System Restore,
and that will go back to a date in time when your computer was working fine.
Try that first.
It is the least invasive and you do not destroy any data.
If that does not work, you can do a Microsoft Refresh.
That is the key term there. "Refresh."
That replaces all of the system files
back to their original state
in case some virus got in there and chewed on them.
If that does not work,
then I would do a full HP Recovery.
Of course, backing up all of my important files first.
Those major three things:
System Restore, Refresh, HP Recovery.
It is about the steps that you are willing to take to fix something.
When you are trying to fix any problem,
you do not just jump to one solution and expect it to work.
It is really based on your individual issues,
or what you are willing to do.
If you jump straight to recovery, you may lose all of your other stuff.
It is a more drastic step.
But if some Windows update or some other update ran over night,
and now I turn on my computer and it is not acting correctly,
you can use Windows System Restore to restore it to the settings it had
before that last update install.
I am glad you mentioned that. It is a very real situation.
Where one of my family members will come to me and say,
"I turned the computer on this morning and now it is doing something weird."
Why would something change while my computer is off?
Because that is the first thing they say. "I did not do anything."
What you have is auto updates.
Microsoft, HP, your virus protection program,
they are all looking for updates all the time.
And they are going to install.
One of the things Windows does now is,
it can delay the reboot that is required for installation updates.
If it delays it long enough, it will actually force a restart.
So you may not have done anything to the PC for a week
and the next day that happens.
Normally, something has changed.
You just have to find out what it is.
Like, what Kevin was saying,
the effort you put into it is directly proportional to how fast you fix the problem.
If you just want it back the way it was,
you do not want to do a lot of troubleshooting,
you can try that system restore.
Let's walk through those one at a time.
The idea of system restore is,
today is Wednesday, my computer is not acting the way I expect it to,
but I think when I used it on Saturday, it was working fine.
So now I want to revert it to the way it was on Saturday.
We are going to do one step prior to that.
As Randy was saying, he goes into Application.
He removes the application that is causing that error message.
So it happens in a specific situation?
You try and address just that one.
Let's go down to the PC and we will show you the different options.
We are going to launch the HP recovery manager
lf I can get the words right.
Inside our recovery manager,
we have a couple of different things that we can do.
First, we are going to go into the Windows Start Menu.
Just type in, "recovery."
It will pop up on the side there.
There is the Recovery Manager.
There are two options. There is, Create Recovery Disks,
and there is Recovery.
We are going to go into Recovery Manager.
And we will say yes to the User Account Controls.
This will open the HP Recovery Manager.
We will be looking at these options here.
This is where you can look when you need help immediately.
The first one is the Software Program Reinstallation.
This is where, if you are having an issue with the application that came with your PC,
remember, these are only the ones that came with your PC,
you can reinstall them from here.
If it did not come with your PC,
then you have to use the Software Installation Media
that you bought -- like if you went out and bought a game,
and it is always messing up,
then you would uninstall it and use the Software Installation Media
or thedownload from the web.
This is just the HP applications that were on there.
So, like, if you have a webcam on your computer,
you can come in here and reinstall it.
We are going to go into this and show you what actually happens here.
It says "Welcome to the Software Application Program."
It will give you a list of the different apps that you can install.
This is a list of the programs that were installed on the computer when I got it.
Right.
They are usually tied to your major functions like your disk drive.
Those major functions are the ones you will see.
You will not find as many of the games here.
If you are trying to reinstall something you have installed,
they are not going to be here.
We are going to go back.
We are not going to do the software.
If you went out on the web and reinstalled the latest driver,
and that driver was causing you issues,
you can go back to a previous version of the driver.
Right here, we are looking at the Hardware Driver Installation.
This is for desktop PCs.
It is similar to the screens for notebook computers.
Here, we will reinstall one of the drivers.
These are the drivers that came with the PC out of the box.
You can reinstall a graphics driver.
You can look for wireless, and audio, card, network.
I have had pretty good luck reinstalling the wireless driver.
That tends to get a lot of problems resolved.
If you are having network problems, come in here and reinstall that guy.
This ties to what we said earlier. It really depends on the scenario you are having.
If wireless is not working, you probably do not have to do a complete system recovery.
You may try reinstalling the original driver that came with that device
and see if that makes it work.
How do you tell if it is an application problem or a driver problem?
It might be hard to tell for the average person.
One of the things you want to keep in mind is,
What is the error message?
Or, what are you doing when you experience that issue?
Is it only when you open this application?
Is it only when you are trying to access the web?
Is it only at certain times?
That is the key.
For instance, if you are trying to use your web cam,
and it looks like its opening but then disappears and does not load.
That is probably the application.
But if you open up the camera and, where it would normally show your camera back to you,
but instead it says, "No image available."
Then you are more looking at reinstalling the driver or some other conflict.
The software instead of the app.
A big one is, if you are not connected to the internet,
and wehn you go to connect to the internet,
all the sudden, all these problems magically appear,
that is the first symptom that you have some virus on there.
And you might want to think of doing a full HP recovery on that.
If everything is not working. Lots of problems.
That is when you are looking at more permanent problems.
Here is a point that we probably overlooked.
We talked about the preparation of backing up and recovery disks.
You have to have anti-virus on your computer.
It is essential.
And it has to be updated regularly.
There is no way around it.
You could potentially be infecting other people on the internet too
if you do not have anti-virus software.
Bill, I am going to turn it back to you.
I think you were waking us through
the options to fix things.
It looks as though HP offers them in the order of least impact
to greatest impact.
Good eye. You noticed it.
That is really what they are doing.
In the Recovery Manager,
what you will see next is (we are going to go back here)
the Microsoft System Restore.
So we will go back to the main menu,
actually we are on this side,
The right side.
This is where we talk about before your problems happen.
These are the precautionaries.

Actually it is on the other side.
I was going to show the Recovery Media.
It is over on here. And there it is.
Microsoft System Restore is the next one in line.
This is the one that takes us to a point back in time.
How do you know what point in time you can go to?
This is the preparation work.
You want to set a Microsoft System Restore point.
And most of the time
(not all of the time)
whenever you install Windows updates,
there is usually a restore point before you do the updates.
You can go back to before you updated.
Windows sets those times, for the most part.
Unless you shut it off or tell it not to,
for the most part -- especially with newer PCs --
it will be set to give you almost every time it successfully goes through.
It will give you an option.
One thing to keep in mind,
if you are preparing for disaster,
and your PC is running really well,
set a restore point.
You know that it is running well,
set a restore point so that you can go back to that.
And you can name what that restore point is.
I actually did that here.
We are going to go to Microsoft System Restore,
and then it is going to say, "You are going to use restore point,"
and we will say Next.
And we will go into the restore point.
It will actually look for any restore points that I created.
And here we go.
This is telling us that we are going to restore to an earlier time.
And I have two restore points here.
I have one that I set yesterday.
And it was first boot.
I named it "First Boot."
I named it that.
The second one is "After Windows Update."
I ran Windows update.
It was running just fine.
So I created another restore point.
If there are other updates that are run,
and restore point saved, they will appear in this list.
If you do not have any restore points,
this is not your option.
If I am a viewer watching this conversation,
and my computer is running well,
I am wondering how to set a restore point.
We can show you.
Can we take a second to do that?
We certainly can.
I want to welcome anyone who is just tuning in.
We are in the middle of our how-to video series.
We are talking about refresh, restore, recovery.
The different options you have to fix your computer
when something has really gone wrong.
We are talking you through each one of those steps.
If you have any questions, ask them on the comments box on YouTube.
Or, if you have access to Twitter,
you can ask a question using the hashtag #hpexertday.
We are having this how-to video series in conjunction with our consumer support forum.
If we are not hitting on the questions that are most important to you
if you have a completely different topic,
be sure to visit the support forums at hp.com/expertday.
Let's talk about setting a restore point.
Maybe we can zoom back in on the computer.
Armed only with a keyboard and mouse.
We will find the mouse on my screen here.
There is the mouse.
You can type in "Restore Point."
Or "Restore."
And it will pull up different options.
I cannot read that very well.
I am blind.
This is Windows 8. Can you also type "restore" in Windows 7?
Yes you can.
Another way to do this, and I can show that too,
if you go into System Properties,
go down to the Start menu down here,
This is 8.1. I right-click here and a menu pops up.
There is the System folder. You can select System.
Another window will open up.
Right in the middle.
We will go over here on this side.
You will see the different settings available.
Click System Protection.
It opens the window that was open here.
With Windows 7, you can right click on My Computer
and select Properties and it will take you to that same first screen.
You can click the Start button and go to the search as well.
With Windows 7, you just cannot start typing on the screen.
You have to click the Start button and then the Search bar.
You can search the same things.
The very last selection is Create a Restore Point.
And that is it.
When you click on Create
it will ask you to name it.
and you type in . . .
How-to video series.
Expert Day.
Once you click on Create, it will take a little while to create it.
About five to ten minutes.
Then it will show up in those options.
Now we have helped anyone watching create a restore point.
Good real-time tips and tricks for us.
Let's take you back. You were going in order how to fix your computer.
We were talking about the Restore option.
We saw some previous restore points that were options.
Let's say that that is not an option for us.
Although you did have some.
What would be the next step?
The next step will be a System Refresh.
We have those options available too
but they actually reboot the PC and take you out to a different environment
and reboot from our recovery partitian
that has the Windows files on it as well.
Depending on your operating system.
Windows 7 has some features and Windows 8 also has some refresh
or the ability to save your system
but HP allows you to go back in before the operating system
and do all of that Recovery Manager stuff.
It is easy to open it up.
You just go to the Start screen in Windows 8
or the Search box in Windows 7.
Just click Start/Search and Refresh.
"Refresh Your PC."
We have a couple of questions.
One of the things was on the recovery media.
If I have a Windows 8 PC,
and I upgrade to Windows 8.1,
which I think you were just talking about,
can I create recovery disks for 8.1?
Or do I only get recovery disks for Windows 8?
How does that work?
Go ahead Randy.
This is the easy one.
Your recovery disks are for a specific operating system.
In this case, they would be Windows 8.
It is what first turned on your computer.
It will return you back to the state the computer was in when you bought it.
You would then have to reupdate to Windows 8.1.
Okay. Great.
Will the recovery disk also save my pictures and email and stuff like that?
What does the recovery disk do?
The recovery media is an image that comes from the factory.
It is a set of disks that contain the set of media that was on your computer when you unboxed it.
That means that none of your pictures are on it.
None of your videos.
None of your documents.
They are not there.
Returning it to the state it was in when you first turned it on.
It recovers the software and not your files.
That is why you should back them up.
Make sure that you have another solution for your files.
There are tools out there for backup and recovery
that allow you to make an image of your hard drive
so that, if you do fail
and you just want to redo that image,
there is software that will do that for you.
The HP Recovery Manager does not do that.
Windows 8 does have that ability.
And Windows 7 as well.
System image creation.
Specific versions, not all versions.
System Image Creation Utility.
That is part of Microsoft Backup.
You can create the entire image onto a set of disks.
But the recovery media from HP does not do that.
It does just that system configuration.
We have a support article on it on hp.com.
Please tell us.
Go to hp.com and in the upper right hand corner search on
the operating system and creating a system image.
Let's talk System Refresh.
I think that is where we were going.
We are going to go to the same recovery manager
and I am just going to hit the Windows key.
Hit that key.
I am looking at myself.
There we go.
I am just going to type in "recovery."
And it will show up in the top corner over here.
Did I type in "recovery" correctly?
No I did not.
Too fast.
There we go.
We are going to select Recovery Manager.
And it will relaunch.

I have to find the mouse.
There it is.
Say "yes" to it.
This will open Recovery Manager.
In Recovery Manager, there is a System Recovery.
We are going to select here.
Done.
We will select "Yes" to reboot.

All this is saying is that you are resetting to factory defaults.
That will wipe out all of your data.
That is basically what that stuff said.
Now we will restart and it will move to the recovery partitian.
It will reboot from there.
And then we will have a lot of other options.
Refresh is one of them.
When he says recovery partitian, back to what you asked earlier,
about the hard drive versus the disks,
when we say partitioned it is a separate section off the hard drive.
So we are not working within the operating system,
we are in a whole different section.
It is more protected from viruses.
Where a virus might chew on your main boot partitian,
but the HP partitian is sitting off protected.
Recovery is protected. The rest of the hard drive may get a virus.
Hard drive recovery is much faster than disks.
It is much better.
That is a good thing to talk about right here.
With recovery from disk or a USB drive like we have here,
you will have different times required for different versions of that recovery.
A recovery from the hard drive that we will show here
is about twenty minutes.
It depends but it is about twenty minutes.
Recovery from disk, depending on how fast you can swap those disks,
will take about thirty minutes to an hour.
The recovery from support set disks,
which are these ones here,
those ones will take a lot longer
because they have to inspect the PC and do something called "cooking".
Like the cooking process.
And that will take about three hours.
Depending on how fast you go.
Those are all considerations to keep in mind.
Let them keep running. If they are sitting there and it seems like it has been an hour
let it go. Keep it running until you are sure it is done.
Thanks, Kevin. That is actually one of the questions.
A user says they have done this before and it takes a really long time.
When do you know when to start over?
I think what you are saying is, when you get to this point,
allow yourself some extra time because you want to let it run its course.
That is the key. If a recovery appears to be failing,
you might have a hardware issue.
That might be why you have to run this recovery.
Because something else is happening on your system.
that will help you locate that hardware failure.
Diags = Diagnostics.
Diagnostic testing software.
Do not give up until you have let it run.
You ask how long. If it has been three hours, I would still let it run a couple.
It does not hurt you to let it go that much longer.
A good rule of thumb: I said about twenty minutes for the hard drive baste.
If you created the recovery media,
it is about an hour to an hour and a half.
The HP support media is three hours.
Do a hundred percent.
One hundred percent longer.
So if it is taking 30 minutes, give it 60.
If it is taking an hour and a half, give it three.
If it is three, give it six.
I think the computer should be back up and we can move on to our other step.
This is basically what we are seeing.
I need binoculars.
Here is "I need help immediately."
This is a system recovery option here.
If we go over to the other side,
you will see what the other option is.
Look what we have here. A file backup program.
If you have not backed up, do it now.
I wanted to show you this one because it is important.
One quick thing to say:
If you have a virus, do not back up the files that have the virus.
Hopefully, you backed up before you got the virus.
Because you might be backing up files that are infected.
Keep that in mind.
You want to isolate your backup.
If you think you have a virus, back it up but inspect those files
before you put them back.
Run your virus on your files.
I have seen that happen too.
Someone has a virus, runs the recoery, and puts the files back
and then there is another virus. It was your backup files.
They were infected. You reinstalled them.
We will go back over to the other side.
This is your system recovery.
We booted into here.
This will res tore your computer using the HP recovery.
We wanted to show the Microsoft System Refresh.
We are going to reboot the PC one more time.
This is where you can do your system restore.
I wanted to boot into here just to show this.
There is your recover without backing up your files.
If you select the one where you want to backup your files first,
it will take you to the backup.
Then you will do the backup.
This one will take you right into recovery.
The backup allows you to save some of your personal files.
It lets you select which folders, which file types. Things like that.
That may not be possible if your hard drive is toast.
If your hard drive is toast, you are not in this window.
If your data is too far gone, you may not be able to backuup your files.
I will click this and it will say that we are going to reboot.
And I will say yes to reboot.
And I will tap the Esc key on my keyboard.
I am doing this because I want to bring up this menu.
We will select F11,
which is System Recovery.
It will take us into the same section
but it will reboot to the recovery partitian
from an outside standpoint.
It is not going to take us to the HP section yet.
It will use Microsoft first to get us there.
That is where our System Refresh is.
While we are waiting for the computer to restart,
I want to welcome any new viewers that are checking out this how-to video series
we are doing in conjunction with our May 14 HP Expert Day.
If you have a question, ask it on the YouTube comments stream.
If you use Twitter, ask your question using #hpexpertday.
If you have a question on a different support topic
join the conversation at our HP Consumer Support Forums.
The easist way to get there is hp.com/expertday.
We are talking about Microsoft System Refresh.
Bill is about to demonstrate that for us.
Let's continue on our journey.
There are a lot of options here.
We are interested in the troubleshooting option.
We will select Troubleshoot.
Here are the Microsoft options.
We have Refresh you PC.
If your PC is not running very well,
you can refresh it without losing your files.
That is what that option does.
That is basically reinstalling the OS.
The Reset your PC is also a Microsoft option
that does the same thing as the HP recovery manager
wipes everything off and resets your computer completely
to the factory default.
Those are the two options that you have.
When you make your selection, it will take off and run.
We will click on refresh.
This is the PC I want to refresh
and the administrative account that I have set up on it
and I have to type in a password for the next one.
And then it will go, so I am not going to type in the password.
Depending on what the refresh requires
it could take quite a while. Three or four hours sometimes.
It depends on how many files and how much software. It depends on tall that.
Exactly.
We have not defined what HP Recovery does.
That is the final step.
We have done all of these things.
A system restore, a refresh. If it is still having problems
maybe it requires an HP recovery.
Maybe that virus was a little too nasty.
It will wipe everything clean and return it to the original factory condition.
When you are out of Microsoft options as well.
Your hard drive is not working. You cannot access that screen.
It will resolve any software issue that I have ever seen.
But it puts it all back and you lose everything.
You have to reinstall everything you have installed since.
The important thing about the recovery,
is when you are looking at a virus. We have talked about that a lot.
The only way to completely get rid of a virus
is to wipe the hard drive out.
This will completely eliminate any possibility of it coming back.
That goes to the HP recovery partitian too.
You are not positive that the virus did not get to the recovery partitian.
Your disks that you backed up with
would be a really good solution in that case.
So, if you have the recovery media,
then use it in that situation.
I would not recommend doing the disk based recovery.
I heartily agree.
I think you have done a great job of running through the different options.
We have a couple of questions.
What happens if I lose my recovery media?
What are my options?
We can talk to that too.
Depending on how old your computer is.
If it is within the last several years,
depending on your country and region,
you can generally order them from HP.
So, if you go to hp.com,
put in your model number and go to the product support page
and go to the software/driver option,
select the operating system that was shipped with it
and they will show you if you can order recovery media.
Click that, order it, and you will get something like this.
Another question that comes up often:
Can I use somebody else's recovery disks?
Only if they have the exact same model PC with all the same stuff on it.
Okay.
So, probably not.
And not the same series. Not like the A2500 series.
It would have to be like the 2502.1XT.
It has to be the exact model.
That is important.
We look for the build ID.
There is a build ID on the recovery media.
Recovery media can be used across quite a few different PCs
but they have to have the exact same build ID.
One other thing on the ordering.
So you can order physical media. I often hear, "Can I download?"
Can I download my image? Can I download that?
The answer is no. There are licensing issues and the bandwidth.
Can you imagine? These things are DVDs.
16gb. A hundred internet is going to drown the servers all day.
You may be able to find them on auctions sites.
If you are having a hard time and you really have lost them.
Protect these guys.
They are important. If you do not have them around
you could suffer a catastrophic failure.
You need them. One thing you do not want to do is put them in the sun.
Sunshine will destroy optical media.
That is actually something fairly common.
You put them on the desk where the sun hits.
Store them in a protective container.
Some place safe in the dark.
And then they will last longer.
Not regarding getting the media,
depending on your operating system,
you can also go to the website.
Search for Windows recovery in HP.
HP recovery in Windows 8.
Everything we have talked about here.
You do not have to rely on us talking about it.
You can go with the step-by-step. The files are out there.
Great.
Thanks for covering all the steps.
And demystifying the differences.
They are all named pretty similarly.
Refresh. Restore. Recover.
It is confusing.
You have done a great job of highlighting the differences.
I you have joined late or caught the tail end of this video,
it will be posted to the HP support channel.
Visit youtube.com/hpsupport.
If you have a question on a different topic
or we did not get to what you are looking for,
join the conversation at our HP Support Forums.
There are two ways to get there.
The easy way is to go to hp.com and click on the support tab on top.
Join the conversation for the forums.
Or go to hp.com/expertday.
A lot of experts like these three are standing by
to answer questions. There are a lot of great volunteers as well.
Thank you for your time.
I hope you the viewer enjoyed it.
We will talk to you soon.