Hi All
Thank you for your responses - well after the first HP Simplesave device got worse and worse in terms of not doing what it was meant to do, the icon on the bottom application bar finally disappeared, so i couldn't control it at all, so i returned device to Tesco, they checked it and it didn't launch on their machine either now (although it had been ok on a previous visit to Tesco - what fun i had taking this device in and out of Tesco setting of the alarms every time!). So they gave me a replacement and £5 change as it had gone down in price! Came home all excited and guess what it didn't even launch let alone back up or backup on idle. I spent another hour on yet another PChelp line and decided to go on to Plan B e.g. use the device as a giant flash drive and just do a daily 'windows run backup' that does one big backup and then just amends the data therafter daily. That worked but on clicking on 'backup' i couldn't access anything in any detail so couldn't see what it had backed up. It was only any use if you were to need to restore all yours documents - so with that i returned to Tesco for about the forth time with the device and gave it back! In the meantime i went to PC world & explained the problem to them and ended up buying a 'Clickfree Portable hard drive 320GB' for £109 - yep twice as expensive as the Simplesave but my god its brilliant and worth every penny (both in me feeling secure with having my data reliably updated and in terms of getting my life back from trying to problem solve the HPSS device for which i spent hours trying out different ideas and calling various PC helplines). 'Clickfree' does an initial big backup and then backups every day if you want it to (you can see exactly what it backs up and can control it e.g. how often it back-up and what it does in so many ways). I love it so much! Such a relief to find a gadget that really fully satisfies and does what it says on the label (only thing it doesn't do is delete anything you delete on you main drives (so if you were to need to do a restore at any time it would bring up everything that its backed up - but when it backs up it will add any new documents to the backup including edited copies of documents.
So if your HPSS is messing you around get a refund and get a Clickfree portable external hard drive!
Cheers
Reiki Sue x