Flash Drive

[Guest]

My hard drive is dying and i want to back up my picture folder, which is less
than 2 GB. I bought a 2 GB flash drive. Is this a good way to back them up?
And if i add more pictures to my computer later, can i add them to my flash
drive or will it overwrite what is already on it? Or, if i back up the
picture folder a second time (with the additonal photos) will it write over
my original back up? I hope this makes sense. Thanks

 

[R. McCarty]

Pictures ( .Jpg ) are normally in a compressed format. So using a Zip or
compression app won't yield any size benefits. Best to just do a simple
"Send To" from your My Pictures folder to the drive letter assigned to
the Flash Drive.

One additional note, A flash drive is itself erasable. While having a copy
is a start, important data should be saved to a more "Permanent" type of
media such as CD-R or DVD-R disks. In addition to that you'd want a
copy offsite ( not in your home ) such as a Bank lock box. You can get
small size DVD-R disks that will fit in most standard bank boxes. They
hold just under 2.0 Gigabytes each as opposed to standard size DVD-Rs
that hold 4.7 Gigabytes.

Whenever you backup data - ALWAYS explore or open a sample from
the Copy. Just because it says copy was completed successfully doesn't
always guarantee the data on the backup is readable.

 

[Patrick Keenan]

My hard drive is dying and i want to back up my picture folder, which is
less
than 2 GB. I bought a 2 GB flash drive. Is this a good way to back them
up?
And if i add more pictures to my computer later, can i add them to my
flash
drive or will it overwrite what is already on it? Or, if i back up the
picture folder a second time (with the additonal photos) will it write
over
my original back up? I hope this makes sense. Thanks

As mentioned, you can do simple copies to the drive. A very helpful tool
for this is FileSync, www.fileware.com .

Unlike most of the MS copy tools, FileSync won't just silently give up when
copying files. If a problem appears, the problem file will be noted and
the next file copied. At the end, you'll get a list of the files that
didn't copy, and can attempt a re-copy of just the files that didn't copy.

As to overwriting, by default, files of the same name will not be
overwritten *unless you say so*. If you say no, and there's no more room,
the copy will stop.

Finally, as to flash drives as backup media - they are known to suddenly and
completely fail. I have several such drives in my desk that just stopped
working.

So, these drives are very useful for moving data, but cannot be relied on
for backup. You must have some other form of long-term storage, such as
DVD or hard disk (though hard disks also fail, as you know). And you
should really have multiple copies.

HTH
-pk