Backing up 1 external drive to another USB2.0

Ben D Bus

I keep all my files on an external drive and I want to back up the whole thing onto another drive.

It's 500Gb from one WD 1Tb My Passport drive to another using USB2.0

I'm sure I read somewhere that USB2.0 can trip itself up during large file transfers and gets very slow.

Is is faster to do it bit by bit?

riclad

I never had a problem copying from 1 drive to another.
quote,
How Fast Is USB 2.0?:

USB 2.0 supports a theoretical maximum data rate of 480 megabits per second (Mbps). USB 2.0 typically performs at ten times or greater the speed of USB 1.x for transferring data between devices.


i never noticed any slowdown ,
i usually copy maybe 10 gig ,5 folders, at once.

Copy the larger files first,or the large important folders.
Make folders, eg music,pics, video,
games on the new drive.

Make sure and use remove device icon,system tray, ,before taking out cables,
never switch on ,or off usb drive,when plugged into a pc.


eg wait for message,

it is now safe to remove usb drive 1,
Takes 1 or 2 minutes to appear.
GOING by memory 1gig file takes 2 to ,3 minutes approx, on my pc.

IF you have a good pc ,fast drive ,there should be no slowdown.


some drives are badly designed,
eg they have no power save mode , when drive is powered on.
DEpends on the brand, and firmware on the drive.

riclad

Say you have 4 folders,to copy, drag and drop em ,
into new drive,
eg let 4 copying processes, proceed at the same time ,
ITS faster to do this , than just going copy 1 file, than file 2.etc
But theres a limit as to how many files you can copy ,at the same time.
i don,t know what bit by bit means.

unless you mean using a copy ,cloning program.
Which just copys the whole partition to the new drive.

Freddy Smelly

a quick way to do it, is to use norton ghost.

make an image of the 500gb drive (it is usally about 25gb in size) and store it on your pc
then plug in the new drive and restore the image you made onto the new drive.

it takes about an 1 hour to do the whole operation.

basically you clone your old drive onto your new drive. IT staff do it the whole time.

they buy in x amount of pcs then setup 1 and make an image of it then just clone it onto the hard drives of all the other pcs.

it saves us IT guys so much time and effort

unnameduser

USB 2.0 should have no problems.

You could try alternate software to the built in explorer for file copying. Fastcopy and teracopy are quite good.

Torqay

Freddy Smelly wrote: »

a quick way to do it, is to use norton ghost.

it saves us IT guys so much time and effort

Why would you want to use drive cloning for this job? Neither will it save time nor effort.

Also, copying multiple files simultaneously in Windows, as suggested above, is actually slower. The fasted way to do this is using specialised multithread copy tools (such as TeraCopy or RichCopy). However, the bottleneck here is USB 2.0. Unless you remove the drives from their enclosure and connect them to SATA ports, expect it to be an overnight job (~10 hrs). TeraCopy might speed up the process somewhat if you're dealing with a gazillion of small files.

Ben D Bus

Thanks all.

I just dragged and dropped and it worked fine. Took a few hours but it worked.

whizbang

if you're dealing with a gazillion of small files.

simple way of dealing with this, = Zip them up. not so fast, but easy.

Torqay

whizbang wrote: »

simple way of dealing with this, = Zip them up. not so fast, but easy.

Well, by the time you have them zipped, you'll have them copied too... remember, they're on an external drive and it's still all happening through USB 2.0

whizbang

You have never used Win7 and tried to copy >1024 files so

Torqay

whizbang wrote: »

You have never used Win7 and tried to copy >1024 files so

I couldn't be @rsed... for 20 years have been using Total Commander, which does not suffer from the pesky limitations of Windows Explorer.