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backing up hardrive
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Posted by: Nevada Sixx---------------------
hi, my 10gigabyte hard drive is five years old now, and with all the virus talk, i think i should back up my whole drive...instead of spening 350 bux on the external backup drive i saw, could i just add a second harddrive, and have on it everything that is on my old drive? and be able to copy it all off to a new drive if my first (old) ever goes out?
thanks.
ps,, has your pc been acting slow while browsing certain pages or typeing?
Posted by: Tony Eeds---------------------
I got a 120 gig USB External Drive from Fry's about a year ago for $300 or so. IMHO that is the way to go. It set up as E drive on my old laptop and I copied everything applicable to it. When I got my new laptop, I plugged it in and copied it to C, without missing a beat. I backup all my important files to the external every week or so, keeping the last 10 backups and erasing the oldest. Eash time I copy around 10 gig and it takes about 2 hours. The peace of mind it worth it, and all I have to do is pick up my drive and walk over to another machine to get going if my laptop dies.
Posted by: Jaybird---------------------
Not to hijack you thread, Nevada, but I also have a problem with an old drive.
My very old machine has been sitting for years. CPU battery dead and everything. There are some files on there I'd really like to have.
Would it be over the top to think I could remove that harddrive and re-install it in a good machine to collect whats on it?
Posted by: Tony Eeds---------------------
Jay - You should be able to as long as the disk will still spin and you can get drivers for the controller/disk. Pull out the controller and disk and try to locate current drivers on the appropriate manufacturer's site. Once you have those and the installation instructions, you should be able to plug the board into your computer and power up the disk as another drive on your computer.
Posted by: Zerotact---------------------
IN theory you can add an extra hard drive, and pull the data over the the extra hard drive.... It works like a champ, you just have to get used to juggling the drives arround on the settings so you don't try to boot to the wrong drive.... Most people have IDE hard drives in this case, it's usually as simple as setting the drive you want to boot to as the master, and the one you want to put data on, or pull data off of, to slave... and then plug bolth drives into the same cable, plugging the other end into the motherboard.... Make sure you get the power plugged into bolth drives too ( made that mistake before...)
If you do not have an extra hard drive..... or just want another way to back stuff up, symantec has a program called ghost... ghost will make a backup of your hard drive, that when restored your computer will be exatly like it was when you archived it..... Even better with some patience, you can use ghost to archive your hard drive right onto a cd burner.... Now you could end up with a stack of cd's when you are done, but it would be an exact image of your machine, if you were to have any problems you can take your computer back exactly the way it was before....
I commonly use bolth methods
Posted by: JasonJ---------------------
The main problem with backing to a second drive is that the system OS is not installed on the second drive so you could not just boot to the second drive if your boot drive failed. If you use Gost or a disk image copy utility, you can simpley tell the software to make an exact copy of your system disk, Master boot record, OS, programs, files and all. This works great and all you have to do is jump your backup drive as Master and boot her up. We use a disk image copy utility on Multiple Citrix servers that are the exact same hardware types, if one goes flakey, we will copy aonoter systems drive and boot it in the other box, change the name and IP and put it back on line. Beats the snot out of a tape restore time wise and $$$ wise too.
Yeah you can put an old drive as secondary or slave and get to it from your newer system, just make sure you jump it as the slave or the system may try to boot to it depending on cable position and jumper setteings.
Posted by: thomas123---------------------
Just so you know, having a second hard drive wont protect you from viruses... They can and will spread to all drives connected to the computer. (even networked drives) Also, if both drives are in the same computer, if something happens to the computer (fire/theft/etc...) you loose all the data anyway...
One other alternative is cd-r. Not as much memory as a hard drive, though with the prices of cd-r's who cares...
Remember, if the backups are important, it's a good idea to store them away from the computer, so that the chances of loosing both the original and the backup are minimal.
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