External hard drive help

I got an external hard drive. It doesn't come with any software to back up files.

How can I automatically back up certain files or folders?

The windows back up tool backs up way too much stuff for me.

what drive did you get? What type of files are you trying to back up?

I found that it's eaiser for me to do it manually because I only do a few files a day or every few days.

redneckhouston wrote:

what drive did you get? What type of files are you trying to back up?

I found that it's eaiser for me to do it manually because I only do a few files a day or every few days.

It's an Iomega prestige. 500 GB.

Looks like it might be easier to just do it manually. Just need to back up my pics, documents and stuff like that.

Do you do each one individually or do it as a folder?

jdldx3 wrote:

redneckhouston wrote:

what drive did you get? What type of files are you trying to back up?

I found that it's eaiser for me to do it manually because I only do a few files a day or every few days.

It's an Iomega prestige. 500 GB.

Looks like it might be easier to just do it manually. Just need to back up my pics, documents and stuff like that.

Do you do each one individually or do it as a folder?

Definitely do it as a folder. It would take forever to back up files one at a time. Just drag the entire folder over.

N2rock wrote:

jdldx3 wrote:

redneckhouston wrote:

what drive did you get? What type of files are you trying to back up?

I found that it's eaiser for me to do it manually because I only do a few files a day or every few days.

It's an Iomega prestige. 500 GB.

Looks like it might be easier to just do it manually. Just need to back up my pics, documents and stuff like that.

Do you do each one individually or do it as a folder?

Definitely do it as a folder. It would take forever to back up files one at a time. Just drag the entire folder over.

x2 thats what i do

Thanks guys. That sounds easier than messing with some program.

So do you delete and replace the back up folder or overwrite?


Does it make a difference?

I keep everything I have on my ext drive.

My computer has nothing on it at all.

Most things like my pics, when I load them from my SD card I put them straight onto the external

jeeperjennie wrote:

I keep everything I have on my ext drive.

My computer has nothing on it at all.

Most things like my pics, when I load them from my SD card I put them straight onto the external

What happens when there is a head crash on the external? You should totally setup a RAID 1 or RAID 1+0 so that way you have redundancy lol

why in the hell would your external crash?

Don't leave it plugged into your comp all the time. When I leave the house I take mine with me.

I am not going to that much trouble.

It was more of a joke lol. Especially if you travel with a hard drive, it is more susceptible to a head crash or something similar. It has happened to me before.

got ya lol

Another alternative is http://www.backblaze.com/. They are about the cheapest online backup available and very reliable. They got a pretty cool article on how they make their servers if anyone is interested...
http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/

jeeperjennie wrote:

why in the hell would your external crash?

Don't leave it plugged into your comp all the time. When I leave the house I take mine with me.

I am not going to that much trouble.

I had three blow out at the same time two weeks ago during a power fluctuation issue. On power strips, but not on the UPS w/ the computer - after about 15-20 spin ups and downs in under 30 seconds, they all died.

Fortunately, I do not use external hard drives to store anything of value (ok, I lied - I had all of my photoshop settings and scripts on one of them, and some source code... whoops!). They are always temporary storage for me. I have a 1TB usable internal RAID 5 array (~$600) for "safe enough" storage.

What about those photoshop scripts and source code that were so important to me?

They were in my mozy online backup, and restored in under 2 minutes. =)

Lesson: if it's really important, back it up online too. You never know what could happen to your computer (fire anyone?). Back up locally, and back up remotely if you ever care to keep 'em. There are a lot of options, but I use mozy, and it runs me $5/mo for unlimited storage, and it automatically versions, etc, and runs a nightly backup. Restore is fast and easy for small amounts of data, to restore 500GB will obviously be slow, and will cost you a little more - they have a max "free" download bandwidth cap of a few GBs/month, but you just pay once for the burst, but it's better than just watching it all disappear.

!c

I selected 4 or 5 folders with all my stuff.

It is saying it will take about 10 hrs. for 15.9 GB.

Is that normal???? Seems like a long time.

If the USB port you hooked the external is only USB 1.0 then yes that could be possible. Just make sure both the external and the USB port on the computer are both USB 2.0

What Ryan said.... But also, sometimes it reports a huge time frame, but then as stuff starts transferring over it speeds up and starts dropping in the time down to more realistic amounts

how do I know the difference between a 1.0 and 2.0

..::Ryan::.. wrote:

N2rock wrote:

What Ryan said.... But also, sometimes it reports a huge time frame, but then as stuff starts transferring over it speeds up and starts dropping in the time down to more realistic amounts

LMAO!! That is it right there!!!

N2rock wrote:

..::Ryan::.. wrote:

N2rock wrote:

What Ryan said.... But also, sometimes it reports a huge time frame, but then as stuff starts transferring over it speeds up and starts dropping in the time down to more realistic amounts

LMAO!! That is it right there!!!

LOL. bout right. its gone from 10 to 12 to 5 and now 7 hrs.