Using External Hard Drives To Backup Your Computer
Let’s consider total system backups first. In the old days, you would back up from your hard disk, which was probably about 10 MB, to a floppy disk, which could have been as much as 1.44 MB. You could back up a whole HD to a handful of floppies in about a half hour, just label the floppies, and go on your way. Then came ZIP drives, with (for the time) huge capacities of 100 MB or more.
With today’s 80 GB or bigger drives, it’s not that simple.
To back up an active hard drive the easiest method is to have another hard drive of a similar or greater capacity connected to the same computer. You can use software to manage this (too many programs to list and the hard drives actually sold as backup options will often include something) or you can just drag and drop like you move or copy any files. If you have a lot of data and not much of it changes often, using some kind of backup software will save you aggravation because Windows will want to copy the same files over themselves, every time. This takes forever! And is usually not necessary. On the other hand, if you generally work in files that are unique, you may be able to say no to the Windows system question “do you want to replace files with the same name.”
Either way, make sure you select a real brand, and use the fastest connection available on your machine. For most of us this is USB 2.0. Get the fastest hard drive disk speed your budget (or favorite manufacturer) allows — 7200 will be pleasant, as of this writing.
Hard drives come in all shapes and sizes these days, but here we are focused on comprehensive backups and archiving.
A terrific option for backing up a laptop is something like the Western Digital Passport line, which has several knockoffs also, including excellent models from Fantom. See the Resources section for more.
Currently anywhere from $99 to $299 and frequently available at deep discount merchandisers like Costco, these great units run directly on USB power, are fast and quiet and have rubber coated enclosures. We have a 40 GB Travel mate laptop and find an 80 GB Passport an excellent companion for both backup and archiving.
One important note. Partitions on the same drive are OK for multiple file copies but are totally useless in the event of a hard drive crash. In other words, if you have C and D partitions, putting copies of your files from C on D makes sense if the only concern you have is corrupted files.
For example, if your mail software is on C and a virus were to mess up the C drive files, you would have a clean backup on your D drive. But bear in mind these partitions are like putting up a thin wall in one room. They reside on the same physical disk, so while software problems can be recovered this way, a hardware failure will destroy both “drives.”