External hard drives

What type of external hard drive should I get if I am looking to backup the OS of my computer and all of my files and settings. Will I have to buy some type of specific program in order to do this? I need to for data protection and because I'm not sure if my new m1530 is going to come with backup disks.

 

If you're looking to back-up the entire OS and all your settings you may want to use software for that like Norton Ghost or Acronis imaging. If you happen to be running Vista, it has its own Back-up and Restore center that you could try as well. As far as the drive you'd need, you'd want something with quite a bit of capacity. Check to see what your current hard drive consumption is. If your OS and all your files take up 20 gigs, you should probably get at least a drive that size, if not twice that. Most back-up software also does some compression, so the image is smaller than the original hard drive, but you want room for expansion. For back-ups, I'd personally go with a 3.5 inch drive enclosure, USB 2.0, separately powered.

 

Do they compress the ghost?

 

thanx a lot, that acronis software is exactly what I was looking for

 

Yes, Norton Ghost does have compression options. I believe it can compress the image to 50-60% the original size of the drive with its High Compression setting.

Glad I could help.

 

I would recommend going the route of buying an internal hard drive and a putting it in an external enclosure. I recently purchased the Apricorn ez-bus dts enclosure http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817362002
and the Western Digital 750gb green power drive http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136150&Tpk=wd7500aacs
and I couldn't be happier. The enclosure's fan keeps the hard drive nice and cool, and is quiet too.

Find a good hard drive, and an enclosure that fits what you want

 

Ghost would be helpful.

It's actually something we use here at work, creating images of the numerous different laptops we use and when one has to be wiped/reloaded all we do is attach it to one of the lines in our little office and start a session of ghost up.

With that in mind, one thing I would suggest doing if you go the role of Ghost and have a fresh machine is make sure you've all the drivers, updates, and whatnot as well as any programs you want loaded up onto the machine. Create a baseline image of it, then from there maybe once a month or so creating a new image. That way on one hand you've a completely fresh baseline image to run off of complete with whatever programs you'd want/need that could be placed on the machine in a matter of minutes and on the other you'd also have up to date images with whatever programs/files/etc you've added since then.

It's actually something I'm considering using with my personal machines.

 

Another backup software is Casper XP.

One of my friends took a dislike to Acronis TrueImage after it refused to restore a full disk image onto a new HDD when the old one died. I think the replacement HDD was nominally the same size but actually had fractionally less capacity. so dropped Acronis in favour of Casper XP, which is more flexible.

John

PS: If you are interested in shorter backup times, then get an enclosure with an ESATA port and an eSATA card for your notebook's ExpressCard / PCMCIA slot. eSATA will let the HDD run at it's full speed. I think more of the next generation of notebooks will include an eSATA port - I saw it listed on the Dell Latitude E6400.

 

The apricorn dts enclosure comes with ez gig ii, pretty much a variant of acronis

 

Drive XML too.

 

I just purchased a Hammer 500gb from newegg that was $90. Don't really know what drive is in it, but so far it is working very well. But, having done a lot of shopping, I would suggest you get 2-3x the space you have to backup and if you feel comfortable, put one together yourself after you read up enough on what enclosure to buy!

I bought Acronis TI 11 BEFORE I read their forum. They have quite a few problems right now. However, I did not load it on my FZ - I use it to boot the FZ and make my images by running TI 11 from the CD. This works really well. I have backed up all 4 PC's in the house and have recovered or cloned at least 5 times with these images in the past 3 weeks and all has worked very well. It also has a really nice HDD scrubber on the CD with 5-6 different levels of disk cleaning. I would recommend it over the native Windows BU.

 

The real concern with using any proprietary software for backups is whether it will still work in a few years time when you want to retrieve some files. If you ever stop upgrading software to match the new hardware then it might become worthwhile keeping an old computer in the corner that you know will run the software that lets you read your old backups.

John

 

Very good point - I have actually thought of that and determined that I could do exactly what you have suggested (like probably many here, I have 7 PC's of various ages in the house now - I always keep a couple of older ones in running shape). The day I stop using TI, I'll at least go back to Windows BU. I have Business, so I actually do a complete image with the onboard BU every now and then for grins.

 

I am planning to get an external drive myself. Right now, I am thinking of getting 7200rpm notebook HDD, swap it with the one in the laptop and use the old one as as external HDD (with enclosure).

 

Good idea - "recycling"! Besides my 500gb, I have two older drives that I bought enclosures for that I use for various file storage. I believe they will last a long time if you don't run them often. I only plug'em in once a week when I need to do a backup.