What operating system are you using? According to the manual linked below this program is good for W98 through XP. It even suggests it needs VGA with Vesa - good grief Vesa was almost outdated when Noah left the Ark it seems. Check out this link. The thread is about external drives and there are links to free image creating software. Here is a link that might be useful: PC Clone EX Lite manual

I reformatted the My Book - which went smoothly. The copied a short video. Again - worked well. Now I'm copying a whole bunch of videos - and it's taking time. I'm copying about 10-15 hours of standard definition tv shows. So far, it's been over an hour. I have no idea how long it will take via USB2 connection. The 30 minute video took less than 5 minutes. I have follow-up questions. I wonder what the best way is to back up these files. I just opened up My Documents and right-clicked one at a time - then chose the option to "send to" and selected drive e: my book. I'm sure there's a better way to do this, but I don't know what it is. I tried to highlight more than one file at a time (using the shift key) - but it didn't seem to want to let me highlight more than one at a time. I also wonder if I send a file to MY Book - does that mean it's moved to My Book and the original isn't on my PC - or is it copied there? Raven - I know I should know this by now, but I don't. How do I find my firefox profiles and bookmarks files so I can copy them to the external drive? Lastly, is there a way to copy files to the external drive in such a way that I can get prompted if the file already exists? so I don't make a copy and have 2 copies in there? with many files (like pictures), I may get a prompt that says the file already exists - should I overwrite it or skip. Is there anything like that when copying files to the external drive? At some point, should I bite the bullet and buy a software program to do this. Western Digital tries to give trial periods for the following software : Memeo Autobackup, Memeo Autosync. Any reason to get these? Or any other software? Also, when I reformatted the drive, it wiped the drive clean. Is there anything (drivers, software?) I would need to download from Western Digital (to replace anything I might have erased). I know that the proprietary software that's sometimes loaded with these things (like cameras, printers) may not be necessary at all. Thanks. Lynn.

It sounds like you want to move the data more then just back it up. You should be able to accomplish that with an external drive. The question is, do you have enough music or other files to warrant purchasing a 750 GB drive over a 320GB A couple things to remember, the external drives are great for a temporary storage medium, but I would rather have them on a solid medium as a backup such as a dvd. They do go bad as often as, and sometimes more often then internal drives. I have been working on computers for a long time, and I never understood why someone would back up the whole computer versus just their data. Most of the programs do not have the ability to restore your computer from a backup. You should have the setup cds or dvd from your computer so you should be able to (if needed) reinstall the operating system from scratch should the drive go bad or you get a virus that kills it. There are programs out there that can backup the whole system, but why would you want to? Raid, This is where you have 2 or more hard drives running the same data/ os. If your computer came with the ability to do a raid setup it is usually just 2 or more hard drives with the same data on it. For a detailed description it would be best to do a google search for it. There are different levels of raid. In my experience, the lower levels of raid aren't of much use. I have seen cases where the main drive dies and the data is not readable. In the higher levels of raid, it is spread out or stripped over several different drives and protects you from data loss. Over all, I think for home use it is just best to use a good backup strategy for data (CD or DVD or Tape) of the actual data and should something bad happen, you can restore the data and load the OS from scratch. Here is a link that might be useful: Raid defined

Hi gma_j The link I'm providing should help you, Joe Here is a link that might be useful: move files to mac