External Hard Drive for recovery

[Guest]

I have installed an external hard drive to my computer in order to back up
all my important data. The main reason is I live in New Orleans and was
fortunate my house wasn't destroy or flooded out, and I want a future means
of bring my important data with me the next time I evacuate.

My question is: If I evacuate and take my external hard drive with all my
important data (music, photos, documents, etc.) on it with me, and my
computer gets destroyed, will I ever be able to recover the data on my
external hard drive?

Thanks

 

[Harry Ohrn]

Yes you can plug the drive into another computer and recover the data.
However if you use encryption, password protection or special protection
schemes make certain you make note of those. Of course if you use
specialized backup software you will need a copy of it as other computers
may not have the software required to recover your data. For example I use
Acronis TrueImage and SecondCopy for my backups. I have copies of the
software on my external drive. You should take the power supply for the
enclosure with you if you evacuate so don't make it too difficult to get at.
Be very careful with the drive as dropping a drive, even when enclosed in an
external case can cause severe physical damage. It can be helpful to tape a
note of the things to take with the drive and tape it on the side. When a
person has to move fast it is easy to forget the simple things.

 

[Stan Brown]

Fri, 6 Jan 2006 09:34:04 -0800 from Sean

I have installed an external hard drive to my computer in order to back up
all my important data. The main reason is I live in New Orleans and was
fortunate my house wasn't destroy or flooded out, and I want a future means
of bring my important data with me the next time I evacuate.

My question is: If I evacuate and take my external hard drive with all my
important data (music, photos, documents, etc.) on it with me, and my
computer gets destroyed, will I ever be able to recover the data on my
external hard drive?

Unless you've made really bad choices about backup methods, you will
be able to do that quite easily.

One wrinkle is that you _can't_ just copy your C: drive to the
external drive: Windows will skip open files and files you may not
have privilege to. You need a drive imaging program. I use Acronis
True Image but there are fine competing products.

Whatever backup software you get, follow the instructions to make a
"rescue disk". Then you'll be able to do a restore from the external
drive without having the original hard drive in the original
computer.

P.S. Keep your external drive unplugged both from the power and from
your computer except while you're in the act of making a backup. That
way you reduce its vulnerability to electrical surges, destructive
software, and such.