I am going to get a whole house surge protector. But should I also invest in getting "good" surge protectors for my electronics (tv and related peripherals, computer and peripherals?). If so, could someone point me toward a good one. I wouldn't know what makes a surge protector good (and think just getting expensive is not the way to make the selection). I do have surge protectors in all those areas, but don't think we selected them with any real knowledge. Thank you. Lynn. PS - and my efforts to copy are delayed - bc. I can't find the replacement drive. We received so many packages last week - and during the power outage - so I was opening and putting things away by flashlight - and so far, I can't find it. have this scary feeling that my husband or cleaning woman thought the box was trash and tossed it out. Hope not.

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.

thanks for the comments pkponder and owbist. I posted replies to the other original post, in which I said something related to what owbist is saying here. Basically, acronis support also suggested that I create a bootable CD to restart from. After hours trying to understand how to do that, I got Acronis started from the CD only to have it complain about reading some acronis files all over again (different error msg though). The msgs made it sound as if the file was maybe corrupted or something. This being a new external drive, I seriously doubt there is any file corruption or bas spot on the external disk itself. I noticed how the letter assigned to the external drive changes when I am in normal Windows Explorer Mode & Acronis off the bootable CD. In Windows Explorer, the external Drive is letter J. When messing with Acronis off the CD, it is I but the internal records for the backups kept by Acronis display the file names with letter J. Odd. owbist, caution! I originally thought I was in high heaven when acronis was backing up things regularly but, after this bad taste trying to do a restore, you may want to ck to see if trying to restore is possible or not for you. So frustrating since it did exactly this same restore request last month like a champ! Luis PS - My apologies for not replying sooner. One of the effects of what screwed me up is not being able to start Outlook. Some file called outlook.pst is missing so I have not been able to check my emails for a few weeks...

I will tell you what I go with, for my internal drives I go with Western Digital Black Caviar drives they are more expensive usually but extremely good drives. The last one I got was a 500Gig Black Caviar which I believe I got through amazon. For my external drives I like seagate free agent pro, I like their warranty and features. western digital black caviar