Tina Norris Fields
tinanfields at torchlake.com
Thu Sep 17 11:55:16 CDT 2009
Hi Susan, Jumping in here to keep you from having the same difficulty I had. I used an external hard drive for all my archived inactive files, also for all my photos, and for all my genealogical research. External drive so as not to overload my drive C: So, far, so good. What I failed to do was to make backups of the external hard drive, too. So, when it failed last winter, I had a very big OOPS - one that a geek like me should never have! Thank God for SpinRite! Long, long hours (days, weeks, even months) later, virtually all data recovered but, oh my what a hassle! Bottom line - if the external drive is the only place you have some important data, get another drive to put several backups on. Back up the important stuff on both your main drive (C:) and your faithful external drive. The drive that failed was a Simple Tech - though that is a one-off experience. My replacement drives are: a pretty little Toshiba 500GB (I do mean pretty - sleek black with white and gray swoop designs - about the size of a children's pack of playing cards), and a WD 1TB "Book." Hope this helps, T Susan Harkins wrote: > Not exclusively. I'm going to move everything but the current working files > to the external drive for storage and I'll be backing up my current work, > but that only involves a few files daily. I'm not going to update my entire > C: drive -- it just isn't necessary for me. > > Susan H. > > > >> Is this for Backup? >> >> If so, then you don't need a high-powered drive. I use a WD Green drive - >> it's quiet and cool. As far as disk reliability vs. brand I don't have >> enough experience for a recommendation. >> >> I use Ghost 9 for automated backup. The weekly backup takes about 45 >> minutes, and daily incremental backups take about 5 minutes. These are >> set >> to run automatically late in the evening so I don't even notice. (I think >> the latest version of Ghost is 14!) >> >> What size? It depends on how many weekly backups of your C drive you want >> to keep. If you currently have, say, 50 Gb of data on your C drive, and >> you >> want to keep 4 weekly backups of your C drive, then you'll need at least >> 200 >> Gb on your backup drive. However, hard drives are pretty inexpensive so >> you >> can easily afford more than you need. >> > > _______________________________________________ > dba-Tech mailing list > dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com > http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech > Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com > >