Questin about external hard drives

[bayskater]

I have Win Xp and I occasionally burn a data CD or DVD with backups for my
documents and pictures.
I am wondering about using an external HD instead. I see lots of ads for
them on-line but haven't seen anything yet about how they are used.
Do you just 'click' and back up everything on your HD at once, programs and
all, or is for selectively backing up as I've been doing with CDs? If so,
can you just back them up onto the ext. HD then the next time just add this
backup to the disk, or do you delete the old backup. Is this easier than
burning CDs? Can the exrternal HDs be trusted for the long haul or do you
end up backing up the backup to CDs?
On my computer, I have only about 13 Gb in use on a 182Gb HD.
The external HD that I'm considering is an Iomega 250GB USB2 Silver Hard
Drive 33215
Any comments would be appreciated, including a link to a tutorial on this so
I can do my own digging.
Thanks, ..... Fred (77 Y/O duffer)

 

[Dennis Lazo]

external drives are usually just another hard drive that are housed outside
of the computer case where, you plug it in your computer using a usb plug.

so basically, what happens is, your computer will assign the external hard
drive a drive letter. so for example, if you already have drive c: (then
you have a cd drive, which may be drive d then your usb/external drive may
be drive e:.

your external drive will behave just exactly as your drive c: in terms of
storage. the only difference is, it is removable.

so what you do, is just drag and drop the folder and files that you like to
the usb/external drive. you can create/delete folders and files there.

hope this helps a bit.

regards!

 

[bayskater]

Thanks Dennis,
That does help. If I was to drag & drop "My Documents" to the external HD,
then Rename it to "My Documents (date)", then I could keep adding to it
without worrying about conflict of filenames etc.. ? Sort of an archive of
my stuff, since space would be no problem on the 250 GB hard drive.
Fred
==================================

 

[Dennis Lazo]

yep, you can do just that... it should work just fine.

regards!

 

[Guest]

The best thing I ever did was to buy an external hard drive. It makes backing
up a whiz. I only plug mine in when needed and copy files to it. It really
works great. Also I can use it to transfer files to and from other people's
computers
Jim

 

[Mike M.]

Also comes in handy here in FL so you can just grab it and run when the
water rises. :-O

 

[Sharon F]

I have Win Xp and I occasionally burn a data CD or DVD with backups for my
documents and pictures.
I am wondering about using an external HD instead. I see lots of ads for
them on-line but haven't seen anything yet about how they are used.
Do you just 'click' and back up everything on your HD at once, programs and
all, or is for selectively backing up as I've been doing with CDs? If so,
can you just back them up onto the ext. HD then the next time just add this
backup to the disk, or do you delete the old backup. Is this easier than
burning CDs? Can the exrternal HDs be trusted for the long haul or do you
end up backing up the backup to CDs?
On my computer, I have only about 13 Gb in use on a 182Gb HD.
The external HD that I'm considering is an Iomega 250GB USB2 Silver Hard
Drive 33215
Any comments would be appreciated, including a link to a tutorial on this so
I can do my own digging.
Thanks, ..... Fred (77 Y/O duffer)

Some of the external hard drives come with a backup program. You can use
the software to pick and choose what you want to backup; create full
backups each and every time or create incremental backups.

Personally, I skipped the backup program that came with the drive and use
imaging software instead. The program I use has an "explorer" function that
lets me pick and choose files and folders to restore, or I can restore an
entire drive. I run images daily on the main Windows drive and store those
on the external drive. Once a week, I additionally copy that day's image to
DVD and also image my other drives/partitions. This way if the external
drive ever fails, I'll have images/backups that are no more than a week
old.

Don't know of a link but I do believe in "layers" of backup: if one copy
fails, there is another one available. The secondary copy may not be as
recent but having it still beats the heck out of having no backup.

Also you may want to read up on different backup programs and different
disk image programs. Might help you to make your decisions. Common programs
used for imaging: Acronis True Image, Symantec Ghost, Terabyte Unlimited's
Image for Windows. Most of those companies have backup software if that's
what you prefer. As I said, I prefer imaging software but if you need a
name for backup programs to research (the one that comes with Windows is
"okay" but not "great), Retrospect is one name that comes to mind.

 

[bayskater]

Some of the external hard drives come with a backup program. You can use
the software to pick and choose what you want to backup; create full
backups each and every time or create incremental backups.

Personally, I skipped the backup program that came with the drive and use
imaging software instead. The program I use has an "explorer" function
that
lets me pick and choose files and folders to restore, or I can restore an
entire drive. I run images daily on the main Windows drive and store those
on the external drive. Once a week, I additionally copy that day's image
to
DVD and also image my other drives/partitions. This way if the external
drive ever fails, I'll have images/backups that are no more than a week
old.

Don't know of a link but I do believe in "layers" of backup: if one copy
fails, there is another one available. The secondary copy may not be as
recent but having it still beats the heck out of having no backup.

Also you may want to read up on different backup programs and different
disk image programs. Might help you to make your decisions. Common
programs
used for imaging: Acronis True Image, Symantec Ghost, Terabyte Unlimited's
Image for Windows. Most of those companies have backup software if that's
what you prefer. As I said, I prefer imaging software but if you need a
name for backup programs to research (the one that comes with Windows is
"okay" but not "great), Retrospect is one name that comes to mind.

My thanks to Dennis, Jim, Mike and Sharon for your replies.

I just ordered the drive that I mentioned ($129.95 with free shipping) and
will refer to your comments when it comes time to use it.

Fred