Need a reliable back up drive

closed

Anything above 500Gb will give you space for a few backups, so 1TB should be plenty.

Amazon is probably the cheaper of those retailer options. The brand isn't that important, they can all fail sometimes, but you would have multiple copies on different drives

If you stored important info on both c: drives + one copy on dvd, plus full image backups of both machines on a usb drive, any 1 failure isn't a disaster (like it was when you lost that data on the flash drive - try not to make the same mistake of moving your only copy of data to external drives).

What's on your d: drive, backups, system restore? - quite a lot of used space. You can use windirstat to found out what's filling up your drives.

Dollardog

closed wrote: »

Anything above 500Gb will give you space for a few backups, so 1TB should be plenty.

Amazon is probably the cheaper of those retailer options. The brand isn't that important, they can all fail sometimes, but you would have multiple copies on different drives

If you stored important info on both c: drives + one copy on dvd, plus full image backups of both machines on a usb drive, any 1 failure isn't a disaster (like it was when you lost that data on the flash drive - try not to make the same mistake of moving your only copy of data to external drives).

What's on your d: drive, backups, system restore? - quite a lot of used space. You can use windirstat to found out what's filling up your drives.

Thanks closed - I've never heard of windirstat - it must be backups and system restores filling up the d: drive, it must do it automatically as I never go on there. Would the d: drive need copying to the new drive if it is just backups? - I don't suppose it would but amI wrong?

When I first had the lappy, I did the restore discs as it instructed me to. I can't remember doing that with the pc though.

closed

have a look what's there, I can only guess

Dollardog

Just an update - I went for the Samsung S2 Ultraslim 1TB in the end, from Amazon.

I've done a system image copy onto it but couldn't get Windows 7 to back up onto it, keeps trying to back up onto my d: drive which is why that drive was so full, in fact it is full now and couldn't do the last back up so probably need to delete some from it.
On the advice of closed, I have downloaded macrium, haven't had time to use it yet though, hopefully that will let me backup onto the external drive.
If I get stuck, I will be back !!! lol

Thanks for you help guys.
DD xx

Just to add, I also have copies of photos, videos and music on an MP4 player too.