Today I tried to add several more folders and got the message saying the Maxtor was full. It is 160GB. I right clicked on the Icon on my task bar and opened view backup log. The only date showing on the page that opened up is from the back up dated Monday Jan 3. I then tried going to explorer found the Maxtor opened it up found all the files that I store and use daily and in this folder was a folder that says Maxtor backup. Opened this up there are two files one says Home and some numbers the other file says user and has some numbers. When I opened the file that says Home it has two file folders one says C and the other file says History which in the history has 10 file folders each name level one level two and so on. In the User file folder it has 3 folders one says C one says D and one says history. I think this must be from my old computer 2 years ago. As I had a C drive and a D drive. This new computer only has the C drive. I hope this helps. I am not too computer smart and no one in my family nor friends use computers. Thank you for your help.

If you want to be secure, you should get something to securely erase the files. Otherwise, restoring them is trivial. I haven't used this one, but it was created by sysinternals, which has since been bought by Microsoft. Here is a blog on zdnet that recommends Secure Erase. Here is a link to one that got good reviews at cnet. You can find other examples if you google secure erase files.

I use a Western Digital 80 Gb, external hard drive w/ USB2 conection. This drive has its own power source and does not swamp the USB port. (Most USB ports are protected from shorting. If a device pulls too much current from the port, it shuts down and a re-boot is required to get the port running again. I have a 120 Gb Passport drive for my laptop and the inrush of the drive motor will shut down the port. A "Y" connector is required so that the disc drive can pull power from 2 ports.) To back up my importnt data files, I do not use a "backup" utility that uses data compression and put a group of files into a file set. This harks back to tape drives and limited storge space. I simply copy my important data files using the same folder (directory) structure as on the parent drive. Now, the back up copies are readily available by a simple drag and drop operation. For example, you may have financial data that changes daily. Its simple matter to periodically write copies of the current files to the back up space.

Do you need to copy and paste things on the external HD? I shouldn't think so. Apart from the automatic backing up we have it set to do, if there is any individual file or folder we want to put on it, we simply left click on the file's or folder's icon and drag it to the icon for the external HD and it gets copied there. We installed the entire Oxford English Dictionary program on my husband's computer's external HD and it works fine, but a couple of other programs just wouldn't run right when we tried to install them on it. Come to think of it, the OED has a verification process by which you have to show the computer that you actually possess the CDs for it, and that may be why the company doesn't mind which drive you keep it on. We haven't tried downloading any programs to the ext. HD yet, but it seems likely to me that many--especially the expensive programs that don't provide for periodically proving that you have the CDs--will very likely not run well from there. However, from what Cboy writes, with the help of Acronis, it looks like you can backup the whole of your internal HD, which would include programs. So, being new to external HDs myself (a 500GB Maxtor One Touch 4), I'd like to ask Cboy if you can actually remove programs from C:\ (to save space) and then run them from the external drive instead, or if what Acronis does is only to save them so you can reinstall them in C:\ after a disaster and run them from there.