05/09/09

Hard Drive Backup

Hard drives are mechanical devices and they wear out, and when they fail, you could loose everything. This happened to me twice, and to my son twice, and on one occasion the hard drive failed shortly after I bought it. I did have many of the files saved to disk, and some were saved to an older hard drive.

Saving to disks though is a pain. I noticed it takes six CD's to save just the "My Documents" folder. And it's a bit confusing to figure where the last CD left off. I suppose the big space hogs are the music folders (wav files, and mp3's ) and  photos.

I thought external hard drives would be very expensive. But they really aren't these days. I bought a Western Digital Passport Essential for about 125.00  400 gb for fairly cheap – compared to what I imagined. There are other models that hold more.

The thing is very lightweight, and small, and the installation software is written on the drive itself – there's no CD to install. The connection is USB.

One of the things that impresses you is the amount of data it holds. My desktop is 80 GB,this thing is 400 GB. It is much smaller than the desktop hard drive, and not much bigger than a cigarette pack (but the math says it holds five times as much as my bulky computer hard drive.) 

It's plug and play.

After plugging it in though, "My Computer" didn't recognize it. The drive letter was not showing up among the others. I actually had to take the computer to a local shop to figure out why, after running tests myself and turning up nothing. ( It was showing on the system devices as working properly, and  "Add New Hardware" from the control panel didn't work, reinstalling drivers, with reboot - no joy. I went into some other tests; I thought maybe  Windows Defender blocked something. No. Two hours later it turned out to be a confusion Windows was having with my HP scanner/printer. (figures, hate HP.) So the guy straightened that out -I think by renaming the drive and installing another controller.

The problem was not the external drive itself as it worked fine on other computers in the shop. So with that solved, (an event unlikely to happen to you) I went home to fiddle with it.

Saving info to it is easy: just right click a folder, and click   "send to." My Documents was saved in one half hour - no muss...no fuss. It is highly recommended to get one to back up My Documents and system files - but also program files.

One of the most important things on my hard drive is the music, and my website, that's all taken care of now. I can also delete some of those files from this computer, and many other files, to free up this computer for space,and speed.

With this nifty little package, I got all of that done in a few hours..

We sure have come a long way from floppy disks.