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Windows 7 contains a built-in back-up system. To access it right click on a drive letter in Windows Explorer and select Properties, then click on the Tools tab.
As you can see you have the option to back up the files on the drive. When you click on 'Back up now . . .', you will get option to create a system image or set up a backup.
If you want to get a quick overview of where data is stored on a hard drive or network directory, and what types of files are present, try the free utility, WinDirStat, available at: https://windirstat.net/ .
As you can in this screen grab, WinDirStat shows the percentage of a drive's data that individual folders hold. So the 'My Documents' folder has 79.5% per cent of the data on the C drive, and the 'My Music' subfolder has 88.2% of the data in that 'My Documents' folder.
The graphic at the bottom of the screen shows at a glance that by far MPEGs are the most common file type on the C drive, by referring the color code list on the upper right.
When copying files from place to place in Windows you may have noticed that there is a difference between the size of the files in a folder and what Windows calls the 'Size on disk'.
The reason for this is that data is allocated in Windows in clusters, and each cluster must take up a certain number of bytes. Each file no matter how many individual bytes it has, must take up a fixed number of clusters. This leads to wasted space. For example a file that is 13.4 KB (13,753 bytes) will take up 16.0 KB (16,384 bytes) when the cluster size is 4096 bytes. You need four 4096 clusters to contain all of the data. You can determine the number of clusters taken up by a data set on your PC by using the Cluster Size Calc utility, available for download here. In this screen grab we can see how the utility calculates possible cluster sizes for the C:\FooFolder directory for which the Windows properties are shown above. We can see that since the size of the files in the folder is 81,550,109 bytes and the size on the disk is 81,625,088 bytes, with a difference of 74979 bytes, the cluster size must be 4096 bytes.
