Marcy said:
Hi, I have had a few scares lately with my Windows XP Home pc that
prompted me to look into the possibility of buying an external hard
drive. That way I can store stuff on thie device in the event my pc
acts up again and maybe dies on me.
Good Plan
I dont know a thing about hardrives so I just need advice.
-How do I go about copying all my stuff on my pc to this hardrive. Do
i just do basic drag and drop stuff. I guess that would be easy with
files and pictures.
Yes. Once installed, the external hard drive is just another drive
letter. You treat it like any other hard drive in your system.
Minimum, IMO, it should be at least twice the size of the drive size you
store your data on now. I have a 500 Gig and keep images and some other
"quick access" backup stuff I put to it using xxcopy batch files.
-How do i copy the important system files, or do I not need to.
It's "just another disk drive" so you have to decide the how when and
what of what goes to it.
Again IMO:
Best: Imaging software such as True Image or Norton Ghost. I like
Ghost, others like TI. They're about $60 give or take last I looked.
There's a free BootItNG but you have to be a little more techie to use
it, IMO. I've tried all three before I settled on Ghost.
They also, I think, will all compress data; check to be sure. I know
Ghost does.
You can also create an iso recovery disk so if your boot drive
totally melts down you can load up another drive quickly and be back in
business, or if you only need one file, you can get that too.
2nd choice: WinZip. Latest versions can create "jobs" to do backups.
Handy, and compresses data. Can not back up all system files though.
erd Choice: ntbackup, which comes with both flavors of XP (not auto
installed on Home) is fully functional and works well, easy to use.
Drawback is it won't write directly to CD/DVD or compress files. Will
write fine to any hard drive though, including external hard drives.
You'd have to do your own compression though.
IMO compression is important because it lets you keep more backups,
farther back in time, should you need them.
-Are the chances high that something I copy to this hardrive will
someday just not work; meaning are external HD's pretty reliable?
Not much difference between external/internal hard drives. They're all
the same drive, really, and "just another drive" to the user. They
don't seem to fail any more often or be any less reliable than internal
hard drives. And, can be moved from machine to machine if they're USB
types; I back up two machines to mine.
Cause i plan to store info on there and it wont get much activity
hardly. I may just update stuff on occasion. So, is not using it alot
a reason for it to 'stop' working.
Any other advice/tips will be appreciated. thank you
Get the largest external USB drive you can afford; 500 Gig is reasonably
priced now but terabyte drives are still pretty expensive. Just try to
get twice the Gigs in the external as you have internal if you can
manage it.
Periodically burn DVDs with your most important Full backups. Stash
them for safekeeping somewhere, another building if possible. Then if
you get robbed, whatever, you can at least get a computer up and
working again with all your files/programs at the time of that burn.
Look into imaging software. Whatever you do, be sure you back up ALL
your data. The OS and programs you can always recreate from your CDs if
you have to, but not your data. Imaging software will even let you back
up the system itself and create an iso CD to restore to any other disk
drive, new or whatever.
Beware using encryption until you have read ALL you can find about it
and how to actually recover it from another computer! Many people
encrypt, then discover they cannot get at any of that data because they
reinstalled from scratched, changes OS, bought a new computer, etc.:
Know how to handle that if you decide to encrypt. The encryption isn't
a toy; it's real, and it's generally very save, even from you breaking
into it if you don't have your keys.
My 2 ¢,
Twayne
