If hard drive gives up?!?

Jo4

My sisters hard drive gave up and I am worried that if mine ever done the same I would lose an awful lot of work. I am getting an external hard drive so I can copy the work of both my computers to the external hard drive. Any suggestions on how to do this, someone mentioned that they got theirs shadowed but I don't know how to do this, any suggestions?

abdulinyourface

there are a number of different ways of doing this.

the easiest it creating an image of your hard drive, probably with something like nero and copy that to you external hard drive.

also there are programs out there that will "ghost" (shadow) your hard drive for you and maybe some helpful MSE'ers can direct you towards those sites.

Abs

kevin.philips

Depending on the external hard drive you purchase you shoud be able to see it as an extra drive when you double click "My Computer" on the desktop, this should allow you to simply copy and paste the files you want to keep across to the external drive.

Shadowing the drive will copy exactly the contents (Opearting system, programmes and everything else) and may be overkill if it's just key files you wish to keep.

HTH

Regards

kevin

albertross_2

Norton Ghost or Acronis Trueimage, there is a sticky thread at the top of the page about backups.

Backup to DVD if you want extra security.

Jo4

abdulinyourface wrote:

there are a number of different ways of doing this.

the easiest it creating an image of your hard drive, probably with something like nero and copy that to you external hard drive.

also there are programs out there that will "ghost" (shadow) your hard drive for you and maybe some helpful MSE'ers can direct you towards those sites.

Abs

What is nero? How long does it take to "ghost your hard drive"?

Jo4

kevin.philips wrote:

Depending on the external hard drive you purchase you shoud be able to see it as an extra drive when you double click "My Computer" on the desktop, this should allow you to simply copy and paste the files you want to keep across to the external drive.

Shadowing the drive will copy exactly the contents (Opearting system, programmes and everything else) and may be overkill if it's just key files you wish to keep.

HTH

Regards

kevin

What does overkill mean, sorry I am not up to date with these terms? Wouldn't I be best to shadow the drive?

albertross_2

how much data do you have?

If you read the threads in this forum often, you will see many people who wished they had ghosted their hard disks, sat in front of a dead unbootable pc, with no backup.., and no method of getting at their data. Ghosting to DVD is the answer.

Jo4

albertross wrote:

Norton Ghost or Acronis Trueimage, there is a sticky thread at the top of the page about backups.

Backup to DVD if you want extra security.

How much will this cost?

Jo4

albertross wrote:

how much data do you have?

I have definitely used 10gb on one drive and possibly 10gb on the other. The desktop has 25gb, if I remember properly and the laptop has 40gb.

abdulinyourface

nero is a cd/dvd burning software, very common.

overkill means to overdo it. you might just want to copy a select number of files (i.e. your work files) and not they "whole" hard drive!

ghosting doesnt take too long but it all depends on how much you are backing up and also your laptop specs (although your laptop specs even if slightly old wont make too much of a difference)

backing up to cd/dvd is ok but once you have backed up thats it! you cant use that cd again unless you get re-writable cds! An external hard drive is good but be careful you dont knock it or anything as you could run into the same problem as your existing one i.e. lose all data on your external hard drive! But the chances of that are slim if your careful

Abs

gaming_guy

dont some external drives have a button that you press to backup the data on the computer onto the external drive?

EDIT: just found this on 1 touch backup