I'm back and searching for a good, reliable hard drive enclosure that has esata connection (for faster data transfer). I didn't realize that the drives we discussed above were only USB transfer. I had bought the Nexstar CX: http://www.amazon.com/gp/cart/view-upsell.html?ie=UTF8&HUCT=2&newItems=U35WX1CZO87WNR%2C1 But when I went to set it up, discovered that it is only USB connection. I didn't realize that by sata they meant the hard drive type - not how the external drive would connect to my pc. So now I'm still looking for a reliable hard drive enclosure - with esata connection (and actually, one with usb and esata would be great). Thanks. Lynn.

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.

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.

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...