External Backup

big_al_41

14 years ago

Two questions please:

I am about to put up a external HD for backing up my Vista 64X machine.

Do I need to format the HD that goes in the External case?

And.... does Vista allow an incremental back for later on ??

Much thanks to all

Big Al

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Comments (10)

stargazzer
14 years ago
Lordy, my comprehensive skills have finally left me I didn't understand one word of that. I will be interested in this reply as I have an external hard drive and a vista PC 64bit.
bpgreen
14 years ago
If you bought an external drive, it was probably already formatted. If you bought the case and then bought a bare drive to go in it, you'll probably need to format it yourself. I'm not familiar with what's available in Vista for backing up, but I would probably get an image program for backup purposes.
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what acronis does is different than just doing a back up of files, acronis takes a snap shot of your entire hard drive including the operating system so it is an image, then should you need to restore from it you would be restoring every single thing including the operating system. In doing just data and file backups should you need to do a full reformat then you would need to have either a copy of your operating system cd to re-install your OS or the recovery cd, and then you could use your file and data backups to put those back in place once you had re-installed your OS and done all the many updates for it, which can be a long and tedious procedure. So it is a better way to backup when using an image you can be back up and running in very short order at the exact point in time that you did your last image save. You could certainly leave the data you have saved on the external hard drive and just make a new folder to put your acronis images into you seem to have plenty of room available. Usually the acronis version that comes with a branded drive may be a bit different than the stand alone version of acronis you can buy but I would think it would be just fine. there are some very good tutorials available on how to use acronis if you need those just ask or google for it. In my opinion an image backup is the best way to go.
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Loralee you can use Windows Explorer to remove any entries from the computer hard drive or the external although if it is a program then the Add/Remove feature should be used first then check Explorer for remnants left by untidy uninstallers. In Windows Explorer up at the top is a small box icon with a down arrow, here you can elect to see the contents as bare names, Details, icons etc. Select Details so you can see the date and size of each backup. Now you can compare them and if they are all somewhat of the same size then you could safely assume they are all full backups and later ones not incremental on the original. Of course the best solution in my mind would be to run a full anti virus and anti malware scan, run Ccleaner or similar to clean all the junk off the computer then create a new image and remove all the others. That is as long as you are happy with the way the computer is behaving right now. No point backing up while there are any annoying issues unresolved.
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I have two external hard drives, both Western Digital. One has its own power source; the other is powered by USB. Both are 1 TB and I have never had a problem. Pooh Bear ==================== This was sent to me thru one of my Yahoo groups: As I have been going through my archived data discs I have been coming across several of them that have become bad over the years and thus I cannot get anything off of them. There are photos and videos that were on some of them that I cannot replace:-( So, I made an account at an online file storage site to save my precious files to the cloud to help save from disc deterioration. As I was looking around to see what my options were for storing my sensitive data I came across this site and found it interesting. The discs are pricey (about ~$3 a disc) but they are known as the '1000 year disc.' It takes a special burner to burn them. The DVD Burner is like $40 at Best Buy so you can probably find it even cheaper somewhere else if you shop around. Not sure if there are any retail sellers for the M-Discs though. I didn't dig too deep trying to find anything. Check out the site because it is interesting. They say it is like burning the data into a rock, lol! Anyway, I found this a while back and thought I would share it with you real quick while I had the time:-) M-DISC, Write Once and Read Forever. You might feel like you're making a "permanent" backup of your files when you copy them onto a DVD or backup to a computer hard-drive, but the truth is these devices suffer from natural decay and degradation. Current DVD technology uses organic dyes and low laser power to make marks on the data layer of a standard recordable DVD. Over time, these marks become unreadable because organic dyes degrade when exposed to minimal levels of light, heat, and humidity. This means all the data you thought was safely stored could be lost because the discs you used have an average lifespan of only about 3 to 5 years! Why would you risk your data based on an average; hundreds of discs taken into account in that average were corrupt and unreadable after only a few months. With Millenniata, we don't subject you to the possibility of losing your data. When we say "Write Once and Read Forever", we mean it. Here is a link that might be useful: http://millenniata.com/m-disc/
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grandms
14 years ago
I recently went through the "agony" of re-installing XP operating system on a new hard drive after the drive in my computer died. I used the recovery DVDs that I had made when the machine was new in 2004. Of course, this put my drive in the condition the old one had been in back then, including all the "bloatware" that the manufacturer had installed. Then I had to do all the MS updates up to and including SP3. Fortunately, I had backed up My Documents on an external hard drive, but I still had to re-install all my programs and other applications that I had. I vowed, "NEVER AGAIN". So I found Acronis True Image on sale at NewEgg and purchased it. There was also a $20 mail in rebate offer besides the good sale price. Now I have done a full backup of my new hard drive, which includes the updated operating system. I plan to do regular incremental updates as well so that if a catastrophe occurs again, I won't have to go through two weeks of needless labor as I did this time. I'll never be without a "cloning" program again.
stargazzer
14 years ago
Grandms, reformatting is the way I use to maintain my PC and I could have it reformatted and all back on in 2 or 3 hours. I have so much free time and I love working the PC so it was fun for me. I am good at backing up and when my last computer crashed I only lost one thing and it was just a wallpaper. It is a little more complicated now because I have so much on my PC and a slower server.

I tried the to do the back up you mentioned one time, but didn't work for me.
ravencajun Zone 8b TX
14 years ago
you may want to check which format the hard drive is in if it is fat 32 you may want to change that some come with fat 32 still.
grandms
14 years ago
The external drive is FAT32 as is the "D" partition on my hard drive that contains the recovery files that I had burned to DVDs and used for the recovery. I know the "C" drive is NTFS, so does this make for a problem when I want put these files on a formatted disk? The external drive is a 7200RPM SATAII drive and shows up as HDD K "Untitled". I know that flash drives are also FAT32, so does this make a difference? Or is the situation different when using a "cloning" software? I didn't read anything that indicated this. I want to be sure I've done it correctly or it will be of no use to me.
bpgreen
14 years ago
You can copy from NTFS to FAT32 and vice versa, but NTFS is better, especially for large drives. If you're cloning/imaging the drive, it makes less of a difference since you're creating a few large files instead of a bunch of small ones. FAT32 is less efficient using the drive with small files than NTFS.

If the drive is currently empty, I'd probably go ahead and format if NTFS as long as you don't want to use it with any Win95 or Win98 computers.
camp56
14 years ago
There is also a limit of file size on FAT32 drives.
ravencajun Zone 8b TX
14 years ago
the file size limit with Fat32 is the most obvious problem, these days we have large file sizes and are backing up larger amounts of data. I prefer to set them up in NTFS for those reasons and I am not going to be working with any old operating systems so might as well.
grandms
14 years ago
Thanks for the comments. I think I'll start over before this drive gets too full, and format the external to NTFS.

External Backup

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