I have the 1TB Western Digital My Book Essential which has the USB3 connection (compatible with USB2). I use EaseUS Todo free backup program. First I make a complete image of my internal HDD, and then I can schedule backups on whatever schedule I wish. I love this program for its ease of use after struggling with Acronis. I am very pleased also with the WD external drive. They do stand behind their warranties and replaced an internal HDD that failed, without question. All hard drives are subject to failure, so I think you're okay as long as you stick with a name brand.

I still haven't done anything with the drive as yet. I also have Acronis True Image, version 9. I have used it with an Iomega external drive that I have with my desktop computer. But there are things about it that I find confusing. That's why I was wondering about just using the Windows 7 backup since I thought I understood that it was an imaging type of backup. So what is the difference between "ghosting", and "imaging"? Do both do "clones" of the OS? I want to keep things as simple as possible. Owbist, if I do not intend to use the software that is on the drive, I do not need to copy it to the computer HDD do I? Yes, I do understand using a different drive letter for the external drive. With my desktop, that happened automatically. Don't know whether the Acronis software did that or the Iomega drive itself. I have three USB ports, so I think those have drive letters also. I just don't want to have to be re-doing something that should be fairly simple (I hope).

I just bought an external drive this week and love it. Apart from being able to free up space on C:\, it is good for arranging automatic backups. I have it set to back up all of my documents, music, and pictures 4 days a week at a time when I am not going to be using the computer. Until now, I had been putting these backups on CDs and DVDs, but it is too easy to forget to make those backups, and it is also a nuisance saving and keeping track of the disks I saved them on. I like the way I can just drag things to the icon for the external drive, too. Easier than burning a CD or DVD, and it has the advantage that you can erase things and use that space again, the way you might on a floppy or a zip disk. My external drive is a 500GB Maxtor that I found on sale Mon. at Fry's in San Diego, for only $99.99. (They seem to change the products on sale from day-to-day, so I don't guarantee anyone will find the same thing at the same price another day. DH paid the same there the day before I did, but he only got a 300GB Maxtor external hard drive) Today a friend who has a business servicing other companies' computers told me he considers Western Digital's hard drives to be among the best, so you got a good one. However, I was happy when he also said I had gotten a bargain. Guess this is the time of year to look for bargains in computer stuff! I probably should mention that since my FireFox browser's "Bookmarks" (=Favorites in I.E.) and things I have saved in its "Scrapbook" add-on, or extension, are not located in My Documents and thus do not come under the automatic backing up, I am going to take care to back them up to the external drive manually every few days.

The documents and pictures are (mostly) still there. When something is deleted, all that really occurs is that the first letter of the file name is dropped and the file becomes "invisible." You should be able to recover most or all of the files with the right software. However, if you keep using your computer, you stand a good chance of over-writing the files because the space they occupy is "free space" as far as the computer is concerned. My advice: use another computer and do a Google search for "recover deleted files" to find some software that works for you. It's been several year since I've had to hunt for deleted files, so I'm not up-to-date on what's out there. If possible, install the software you select on the new drive so that you don't over-write more accidentally deleted files when you install the new software.