Storage: External drive/ Portable drive / Jazz drives - what is best?
External drive/ Portable drive / Jazz drives - what is best?
by keepfaith - 8/23/07 7:41 AMI have read various threads here on different types of mediums to use for backing up files fron home pc/laptops.
From way it sounds, not one is perfect. Cd-rw disks have problems being read in diff drives. External hard drives can fail. I also heard that data can "degrade" if kept on USB flash drive.
With all this, can anyone recommend what is a good external hard drive to use? BTW, what is difference with "portable drive?"
I was thinking of something like an Iomega USB external HD.
Please feel free to give any input. Right now I have an Iomega 100MB zip drive, a USB flash drive and a combo CD-RW/DVD drive. None at this point have the capacity to save my files so I am open as to what is best to use now. Thanks much in advance!
External drives. . .
by Coryphaeus - 8/24/07 5:52 AM In reply to: External drive/ Portable drive / Jazz drives - what is best? by keepfaithI'm too simple. I have an internal Maxtor drive in an external USB-2 case. I only "back up" what I don't want to loose, not the entire system. About once a month I burn this data to a DVD disk.
Right there with you, Cor.
by ekent - 8/24/07 5:53 PM In reply to: External drives. . . by CoryphaeusUSB hard drives cost less than $250 a terabyte (two 500GB drives when you catch 'em on sale) and they just keep getting cheaper. DVDs give you a safety net if one of your drives fail. I haven't had any failures, knock on wood, and I'm running three hard drives in the case and four on a USB hub. (The external drives are usually off unless I'm working with the files.)
External drive/ Portable drive / Jazz drives - what is best?
by cdelune - 8/24/07 6:03 PM In reply to: Right there with you, Cor. by ekentI have an Iomega external drive and it's been nothing but trouble. It objects to the length of document names/paths (i.e. if you have to drill down too many layers they get pretty long), so it won't save them. It came with Ghost so I thought I would have automatic back-up of everything. When I contacted tech. support they basically said: "Sorry, that's just a problem with this backup system!" Actually, now it isn't even backing up anything automatically and I'm not savvy enough to figure out why. Sooo, I back up my dissertation to a flash-drive fairly frequently, and when I remember I drag-and-drop folders onto the Iomega. I used to backup to my older desktop computer but now the laptop can't "see" it (another story) so I can't do that. I guess two "whenever-I-think-of-it" forms of backup are better than none, but it's far from what I had hoped for with Iomega and Ghost.
I've heard others singing praises of Maxtor external drives so maybe they don't have the same problem as Iomega.
cdelune
Backing up can be easier
by BKMiller - 8/25/07 3:00 AM In reply to: External drive/ Portable drive / Jazz drives - what is best? by cdeluneActually, for file backups only (not system), I've found using Microsoft's (unsupported) SyncToy in combination with Task Scheduler to work pretty well. I've got an external USB HDD attached to my PC, and Task Scheduler kicks off SyncToy twice a day, with no user intervention. It's a very basic file-copy application, but with my external hard drive's capacity being larger than all four of my computers' internal hard drives together, space is not an issue (that's 4 PC's networked, not four drives in one PC).
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