External Hard Drives

[Jen Goodwin]

I just got a 100 gig external to backup my computers and I got questions.

First, can you load the software on to two different computers and then use this thing more like portable storage? (Thumb drives are the greatest thing since sliced bread, I only wish they had bigger storage) So that I can backup both computers to it...or just hook into the USB to extract info off of it...share it between the two computers, so to speak? Or do I need to get another one so each computer would have it's own? (My computers are not networked.)

Also, what do you think of leaving the external hooked up? You can schedule this to backup whatever files you deem important every night; but if you get a virus...wouldn't or couldn't that effect that drive too? Would it be a better idea to backup and then unhook it and put it away somewhere?

Any thoughts? I'm thinking of hitting the office supply store tonight to get another, but if I didn't have to that would be great! :biggrin:

[Bobby H]

What brand of external hard drive is it?

Normally, any USB 2.0 or 1394/Firewire connected external drive should work as a straight external drive without need of installing any extra software. Maxtor's One Touch series of external hard drives come with their own specialized backup software, but it isn't necessary to install just to be able to use the drive as external storage. Some people forego the bundled software and get after-market backup software like Norton Ghost for mirroring boot discs and such.

I'm waiting for Maxtor to release their newest additions to the One Touch II series of drives. They're going to release a 500GB model in the third quarter of this year. The current king of the hill is a 300GB unit with 16MB of cache.

[Jen Goodwin]

It is a Maxtor One Touch II, 100 gig/USB.
So, it is not necessary to install the software?
Thanks Bobby, I am going to go look up Norton Ghost now! :thumb:

[ryan_long_01]

if you are backing up multiple machines to the same drive, it might be a good idea to partition the drive first so that it becomes, in effect, 2 drives (for example it could contain both E: and F: on the same physical drive). then you could have a separate partition for each computer that you back up. if 100 gigs is plenty of room (and i would assume that it is), there's definitely no need to buy another drive...good luck!

[xtremegraphics]

I use a 30 gig laptop drive , works great . I use it the same as a thumb drive. You can run right off the hard drive if you want but it is a little slower using USB. I installed my cutting software on it and do my design in my office, take it out to the shop computer plug it in and cut .....

[Jen Goodwin]

If I leave it hooked up...do you think that defeats the purpose of backup? Could something catastrophic happen that will take out the main HD and the external?

Cuz, if I lose my customer artwork files, life wouldn't be worth living :Big Laugh...I know, it's happened before...only 2 months worth but a HUGE PITA!! I had to rebuild a bunch of trucks that I letter...just got another in yesterday and low and behold...Oh, his file was one of those that I lost!! GRRR.

[skyhigh]

My tech told me to install a "slave" hard drive, instead of the external.... the way he explained it to me, the external dosen't run windows !?? but the slave can.... thus you can also save settings if your running xp-pro.
I don't know how accurate this information is...... I'm asking more than telling.

[Rick]

500gb!!!!! That scares me, just sounds like more files to lose if it takes a dump...(yes I do back up on tape and archive on disc)

[WVB]

The king of the hill is not the Maxtor but the Buffalo 1.6TB Terastation Network Attached Storage. Yes a terra byte of storage! The new storage units by Buffalo is what Jen really needs if she wants to keep them up and connected 24/7. These come in smaller sizes to help on the wallet. These act in the same manor as a network server such as the one I installed for Sams Club last year. The maxtor if you keep it connected 24/7 can and most likely will get a virius the same manor as your desktop would. I would not make the external a slave drive due to this fact alone. It defeats the purpose of having it be able to connect from computer to computer etc. Your best bet is to connect it once a week for the scheduled backups. Also I am not sure that the software/external will mesh correctly between two seperate computers. Even if you partition the external drive you will then lose the "one button backup" feature and most likely their software will only see the first partition set by factory. If this does not bother you, then partition the drive. Use the one button backup for computer 1 and manually drag/drop files from computer 2 to the second partition of the external. I hope I am not losing you here....

[Jen Goodwin]

Not losing me at all, I was thinking that is probably the way it would have to work if I partitioned it. Maybe I should just get another one for my computer... :help:

What would be the difference between the Maxtor and the Buffalo as far as getting viruses? Is there some sort of feature of the Buffalo that would keep that from happening, even though it is hooked up 24/7?

[Bobby H]

The king of the hill is not the Maxtor but the Buffalo 1.6TB Terastation Network Attached Storage. Yes a terra byte of storage!

I was referring only to the products offered by Maxtor. I probably should have clarified that.

The Buffalo setup looks interesting. But it is far from being the largest capacity external storage offering on the market. It just seems to be the largest shown in most computer store catalogs. There's specialized higher end storage systems that offer much greater capacities, but their high cost limits them to industrial level uses.

[Techman]

yes,
Your external drive will be fine for backups. All you need is a good backup utility such as genie back. All you have to do is install the backup utility an every drive you wish, set up what you want saved, set up a schedule and away you go. All of it automated. Then once a month you make a CD or DVD hard copy of your BACKUP files. Then you have every thing u ever need to save a lost job. The hard copy is the important part. This is what saves you in case of a catastrophic failure.


So many have so many ideas one what or how to do this. Some are pure speculation. Some are good ideas. Some are left over from the old days when certain tricks were used to acccesss large drives.

You are on the right track. An external drive is great for backups because you can take it anywher you wish. You can take it home after reach backup cycle for the offsite storage.

My system has a 180 GIG hard drive in the server that all other stations back up too. the only thing backed is all the files in MyDocuments, system settings, registery, the accounting software files, & the bookmark files from the browsers. No need to back up every thing.

Slave drives are nothing more than another hard drive in a system. It makes no difference whether its internal or external. The master drive is the one that you boot from. All drives can be set up to boot your system but only one will be master all the others are slaves. If the present master goes bad. you can set it as a slave and another as a master. Thus your machine will run again.
Techman

[OldPaint]

i agree with techman NOT EVERY FILE NEEDS TO BE BACKED UP. to that end i do backups of only the files that have fear of losing. since i do all my work in corel all i do is get a cdr-w and copy the whole corel directory to it......and the file dont take that long to copy, and will fit on a 700 mb disc.
i had a 2gig tape backup at one time(old tech)and did a backups to it ....took forever it seemed, would hate to try that with a 200 gig hard drive. after that the cd-cdrw came out i unhooked the tape b/u and its still sittin in a box in the closet. DVD writers have come down in price but the discs are still expensive....but they will store more memory.
my 1st line of protection is a 2nd internal hard drive......near the same capacity as my main hard drive...copying files from one to the other is quicker than any other way. and you have access to it same time as you do your main drive. viri dont jump drives...UNLESS YOU COPY IT TO ANOTHER DRIVE.

[Jen Goodwin]

I'm not backing up everything...there is enough crap on my computer that doesn't really need to be there that I can't imagine backing it up to another HD. :Big Laugh But, my customer files alone won't fit on a CD anymore, hence looking into a new solution. Plus, I'm sick of CD's & DVD's. They seem like such a waste of money...once I got a thumb drive, I knew there was a better way! I'd rather have 20 external HD's than all those CD's!!! (falling over, getting stepped on, getting scratched, thumbing through them to find the one you are looking for...hopefully you wrote on there what it was!?! Sound familiar? How big is your pile of CD's? :Big Laugh)

[GraphixCALC]

I recently got a SimpleTech 250GB external (USB only) and paid like $150 for it. I comes with some decent backup software, but the thing I don't like about the software is that it won't AUTOMATICALLY start the backup...it just reminds you to do it.

[cbcie]

I am using a pair of western digital USB/Firewire drives hooked up to my main(server) computer. All of my art is on 1 of them(180 gig) and the other(260 gig) is a backup of that drive. They show up as g and h on my system. H is shared for the other pcs to use and g is the backup.

I manuly bakup files as I need to. A few weeks back the main computer took a dump which reqired a reformat and reinstall. The hardest part was reinstalling all the software.

On the machine that drives my cutter, nothing is stored as far as files. The drives are nice because I can unplug and take with for use on the laptop.

Not sure if this is the best way but it works pretty decent for me.

I also ever so often make a cd(s) of the drive by folder and put them in the safe.

Cheryl
Cheryl

[OldPaint]

I been at this since 86 full time and i have most of my files from then........and all of my corel files dont take up 700 mb! i must not be doin anything.....hehehehehehe CDR files are small, same with CMX. now jpg, tiff, ai, eps can get large....and they are also jpg compression programs.....
THUMB DRIVE...you mean a USB JUMP DRIVE?

[Fred Weiss]

Dat's cos you don't do no printin' OP. Me haz 2 archiv bout 6 to 8 GB a year. :Sleeping:

[Barry]

Dat's cos you don't do no printin' OP. Me haz 2 archiv bout 6 to 8 GB a year. :Sleeping:
Im sitting at around 12gigs for this year only... :D..

Fred is right, once you start printing, files start getting bigger. Some of the files I print are 500 megs or larger.

[smullen]

I bought a 200 GB Maxator One Touch External (with Firewire and USB) under a year ago and its already failing on me....

Every few days when I try to access the drive it just sits there and reads for like 5 minutes then pops an error saying couldn't read or right...

Then, I have to shut down the PC annd reboot, then run all the HD utilities like Scandisk and such... Then it works fine for a day or so... Neither of my two internal drives have ever given me a problem...

Currently I have backed my 300 MBs of customer data up to another drive, till I can get a new drive... I'm not gonna bother with the clip art and graphics as their all on CDs anyway..

I think I'm gonna get a new Western Digital External in a few days, if I can scrape up the cash.... I keep wating to buy a new CD of Fonts or Cliparts, but crap like this keeps poppin up...

[Lonely Fisherman]

On the software side of things...

If you are using your backup drive to "Ghost" or mirror your system drive, I would recommend looking at a program called Casper XP from www.fssdev.com to do that type of work. My experiences with Norton Ghost have been poor to say the least.

I have a friend at a local hospital that works as the MIS. He gave up on Norton Ghost after using Casper XP because he was happier with the speed and the reliabability of Casper. It's saved my bacon on several occasions and handles automatic system backups to a Zip Drive on a nightly basis for me.

BTW: Don't let the name fool you, it works with Win2k and XP. It comes with similar software to do Win95 & Win98 if anyone is still using that? Yuk.

Fish....

[Jen Goodwin]

Well, I am all backed up (both 'puters) on one drive. Easy as that! The drive is hot swappable and has an on and off switch. PERFECT! I just hooked it up using the USB, didn't load the software and just copied what I wanted on there. Put it back on the other computer and shut it off. My computer has USB2, but the other doesn't...what a difference in speed!

OP, I didn't mean that you didn't do anything and had no files!! :Big Laugh Wasn't trying to insult ya buddy! Like Fred, I do a lot of printing. (okay, maybe not as MUCH as Fred. :Big Laugh) I got a little over 4 gig in my customer files this year, so plenty of you got me beat already!

Smullen, sorry to hear about your drive starting to fail...hope mine doesn't! Thanks everybody for your great advice!!! Always appreciated! :thumb:

[ENTDesign]

Just to be a curmudgeon (sp?), I notice only one person having their backup files stored offsite. Failure of your hard drive is one thing, but if you have, God forbid, a fire or ceiling drops, or whatever other physical disaster, you might still be in trouble. Another option to consider is a RAID array for those of you with the really big files.

[Bobby H]

Only one person in this thread or in a discussion elsewhere?

I constantly backup and mirror the art files on my work computer at home and do full backups of everything at least once per quarter. That's specifically over the disaster at shop potential (fire, robbery, etc.).

An additional tip:
Always write the date somewhere to say when a backup CD or DVD was created. You need that reference date for comparisons between files on that disc versus files on a hard drive that might have been modified.

[Derf]

I have a Lacie 200gig and a 160gig fire wire HD and they rock! I want to buy the new terabit HD next :Coffee:

[Baz]

I've had some bad experiences with back-up software. Since i have a large format printer my jobs are often huge file sizes. The software always crashed on me (i got it with my Datastor 40g external USB drive).I can rake up 30-50 gigs a year in my jobs folder.

What i bought is an external USB adapter case that you can hook up any IDE hard drives. I have a 200 gig hard drive in my home with all of my folders (from 3 different pc's) copied onto it plus all other stuff i've aquired over the years (fonts, High res images).

I have many copies of everything. I've suffered hard drive losses since the begining (i aint fun). So the more copies i have the better.

[Ian Stewart-Koster]

Jen, yes, just switching it off & unplugging it is a good safeguard!
Win XP will transfer files at USB2 speed, but W98se will only let the data transfer at USB1 speed which is sssllllooowww, but still worth having!
I've had no problems with ghost at all in 5 or 6 years of using it. Once you get the hang of it, it's OK.