Help Please! How to use Iomega Desktop Hard Drive.

debitcardmayhem

closed wrote: »

If your pc hard disk died or you got a nasty virus, how would you get it all working again? - disk imaging (ie backing up the lot) lets you do that in a matter of minutes, without going through the whole process of finding OS CD's (if you have them), program installers, drivers, and then restoring data

Seconded , it makes sense and always worth doing again after installing new paid for software and I keep two copies of my downloads too. If you have windows make a rescue disk too.

esuhl

CathWales wrote: »

It is showing it as plugged in to the E drive, but the icon is showing a 'Safely Remove Hardware' option and clicking on it it brings up a box giving me the option to remove USB Hard Storage Device. What is this? Will it remove the Iomega from my drive or something? There is a message in the box saying to select the device you want to unplug/eject, click Stop. Windows will notify you when it is safe to unplug.

Just to clarify - this is a feature related to the caching of files. When files are modified, it can be quite inefficient to make the changes in the order in which they occurred. To speed things up, your PC will sort the file-change requests into an efficient order and won't save the changes right away. This improves hard disk performance, but you MUST tell Windows before unplugging the drive, otherwise you can't be certain that all your changes have actually been written to disk. If you just unplug the drive, you might find that some files have been corrupted.

You can turn off disk caching if you really want via the drive properties in the Device Manager (probably not a good idea as it will really affect performance).

Anyway, if you're looking for some easy, reliable software to synchronise files between your PC and external drive, FreeFileSync works really well. Once you've set it up, you can run the synchronisation again just by double-clicking a shortcut.

CathWales

Thanks for your replies and links I will take a look at them, but I am not so computer literate as i'd hoped lol! Closed, I know I should make back up discs as this is my first laptop and I was surprised and quite mortified it didn't come with rescue discs, but am not sure how easy it is to do and wether it saves the right stuff to save laptop if it died. I did go through Control Panel - Back Up Files and chose the options I wanted for just saving music and pics, but it said it would do an entire back up as it was my first time, but it made a zip file of 30 files and some were empty and others only 3 files named, such as one music ile which did contain all music, but also program files, but I did not open them. I ended up deleting the 30 files made through windows back up and copy/pasted the music files. Also, some of the music files are listed by title within the pics I have, so maybe I should have created a Music folder first before copying. Am just trying to get used to the ext hd at the mo and hope it lasts lol. Asides from this my laptop did an auto update after I used the ext drive and shut down and when I powered up today it crashed, tho I did not lose anything and started windows in normal mode I am not sure why this sometimes happens and it panics me a bit!