[dba-Tech] External hard drive

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
>
>   



More information about the dba-Tech mailing list