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Thread: Options for working off external hard drive?

  1. #1

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    Options for working off external hard drive?

    I have two Western Digital drives for backing up my hard drive but find using the Retrospect software cumbersome when retrieving files. I'd like to either work directly from the external hard drive or find a drive where I can "click and drag" files between the external and internal drives. Suggestions?
    Mike

  2. #2
    Joanna Carter's Avatar
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    Re: Options for working off external hard drive?

    Quote Originally Posted by mdd99 View Post
    I have two Western Digital drives for backing up my hard drive but find using the Retrospect software cumbersome when retrieving files. I'd like to either work directly from the external hard drive or find a drive where I can "click and drag" files between the external and internal drives. Suggestions?
    Any drive can be treated as an ordinary disk. Simply don't use the Retrospect software, format the drives ordinarily and copy stuff to or from the main disk to the external disks.
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    Re: Options for working off external hard drive?

    Quote Originally Posted by Joanna Carter View Post
    Any drive can be treated as an ordinary disk. Simply don't use the Retrospect software, format the drives ordinarily and copy stuff to or from the main disk to the external disks.
    Joanna, I believe it's already formatted with FAT32. (I bought it 3 years ago for my 2004 XP pc.) Do you recommend NTFS instead?
    Mike

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    Joanna Carter's Avatar
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    Re: Options for working off external hard drive?

    Quote Originally Posted by mdd99 View Post
    Joanna, I believe it's already formatted with FAT32. (I bought it 3 years ago for my 2004 XP pc.) Do you recommend NTFS instead?
    If you don't plan to share the drive with other machines like Mac and Linux, there is no need to stick with FAT32; it is wasteful on space and limits the amount of data that can be stored in a single partition. If it is only for use with Windows XP, reformat it to NTFS, minimum cluster size (512 bytes).
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    Re: Options for working off external hard drive?

    All's well. I reformatted with NTFS, and it's smooth as silk. Thanks, Joanna.
    Mike

  6. #6
    Joanna Carter's Avatar
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    Re: Options for working off external hard drive?

    Quote Originally Posted by mdd99 View Post
    All's well. I reformatted with NTFS, and it's smooth as silk. Thanks, Joanna.
    Glad to hear it. BTW, if you want to ensure you don't lose your backup on the external drive, you might like to consider, at some time, getting a RAID 0 array external drive. this is a box with 2 (or more) drives in it; the data gets written to both disks simultaneously and if one disk fails, the other one keeps going until you can replace the faulty one. Once the new disk is in place, the RAID controller copies the data from the good disk until they are both in sync.

    Not a necessity but worth considering
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  7. #7
    Preston Birdwell
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    Re: Options for working off external hard drive?

    Joanna,

    I need to make a slight correction to your post about RAID arrays.

    RAID 0 uses two identical drives. The data is split by the RAID controller so that part of the data is stored on one drive, and the other part is stored on the second drive. This is known as 'striping'.

    While RAID 0 makes for very fast read/write, the problem is that if one drive fails, you lose all the data.

    I believe that the RAID array to which you are referring is a RAID 1. This where you have two drives. and the all the data is written to each drive simultaneously, i.e. the drives are 'mirrored'. If one drive fails, the other can take up the slack until the new drive is installed, and the data is re-mirrored.

    -Preston
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    "If you want nice fresh oats, you have to pay a fair price. If you can be satisfied with oats that have already been through the horse; that comes a little cheaper."

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    Joanna Carter's Avatar
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    Re: Options for working off external hard drive?

    Quote Originally Posted by Preston View Post
    I need to make a slight correction to your post about RAID arrays.

    RAID 0 uses two identical drives...
    You are absolutely right. I keep on getting those two things mixed up, thanks
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  9. #9
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    Re: Options for working off external hard drive?

    If you are having to retrieve files often from your backup, then maybe you should review how you handle your files. Are the external drives really for backup or are they used as temporary external storage?

    My wife and I both archive photos, and so I went to some effort to build an automated backup system. I use a two-disk network attached storage enclosure, with two 1-terabyte disks in it. It uses RAID 1 so that the disks are mirrors of each other. After trying several cheap backup programs and finding them all lacking, I went ahead and paid a bit more for ShadowProtect, which I set up to provide a monthly full image backup and daily incremental updates. I keep two months at all times. I have to lay hands on the system every few weeks because something has caused it to stop working, but that has been true for all the automated systems I've tried. Shadowprotect does allow me to mount any given day's backup as a virtual drive, including the ability to get files from it, add files to it (though I don't really know why I would want to do that), or even run a virus scan on it to clean it before a full restore.

    But I use that NAS only for the backup. The main storage is still the disk in my computer.

    I have an additional single-disk NAS that I use as a network-accessible scratch disk. I can use that to trade files back and forth with guests who cannot get to my network computers through my wireless network, but who I do give access to that scratch disk. I don't use that disk either for backup or for primary storage, and I don't much care if everything on it gets erased every day.

    One of these days, I'll have high-speed Internet access and then I'll set up ShadowProtect to run a post-backup process to copy the backup image to a remote site. Until then, writing to removable media from time to time is the best I can do.

    This isn't directed at your issue of how to run an external drive, which is already answered anyway. I'm just addressing what may be confusion between a backup and the thing it backs up.

    Rick "noting that these image backups protect the OS, hardware drivers, and software installations as well as the picture files, all of which are essential to a proper backup" Denney

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