Backing Up the Acer Aspire One

I’ve posted a few items about the Acer Aspire One netbook (with SDD and Linux) which have generated some positive comments. See Sweet Little Acer Aspire One PC, More on Netbooks,  and My Tweaks to the Aspire One Netbook.  One thing I’ve noticed is that the Thunderbird email client has a nasty habit of losing a critical file and tossing out all of the email messages. Because of this, I’ve taken a bit more care to backup the email messages and address book (which you should be doing anyway).

Here’s the simple procedure I use to back up the critical folders on the Aspire One onto a USB thumb drive.

Exit all applications

Insert a USB flash drive into one of the USB ports (File Manager should automatically open. If not, open up File Manager manually.)

Click View and select Show Hidden Files. Some of the files we want to copy are hidden, so this let’s us see them.

Select My Disk (over on the left side of File Manager). Then drag the .thunderbird folder over to the USB drive, which will copy the files onto the USB drive. This may take several minutes depending on how many files you have.

Also drag the .mozilla folder over to the USB drive, copying the Firefox bookmarks and other settings

You can copy any other folders that you want to back up

Click the eject drive icon on the right side of the USB drive indicator (left side of File Manager). This closes down the USB drive and prepares it to be removed.

If you ever experience a loss of email information, simply insert the USB drive and drag the .thunderbird folder back onto the Aspire’s main drive (My Disk).

Remember, you don’t have that much SSD drive space on the Linux Aspire, so be sure to delete unneeded email messages and other files.

73, Bob K0NR