External Hard Drives

[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!

 

[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

 

[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.