Advertisement
If you have a new account but are having problems posting or verifying your account, please email us on hello@boards.ie for help. Thanks :)
Hello all! Please ensure that you are posting a new thread or question in the appropriate forum. The Feedback forum is overwhelmed with questions that are having to be moved elsewhere. If you need help to verify your account contact hello@boards.ie

Backing up to external hard drive

Options
  • 13-05-2013 1:24pm
    #1
    jenn1984
    Registered Users Posts: 1,104 ✭✭✭


    Hi All,

    Running out of space on my computer so thinking of transferring the C Drive to an external hard drive. Is this as simple as copying the drive and pasting it to the external drive or do I need to download some kind of software, if so can someone recommend a good free one? I will be transferring around 80gb and have a 500gb external drive. Also if I want to back up on a weekly basis can I just back up the new files or will it back up everything all over again?

    Thanks,
    Jennifer


Comments

  • Options
    #2
    bonzodog2
    Registered Users Posts: 6,222 ✭✭✭bonzodog2


    If you just want more space on C, then you can just drag-drop or cut-paste between 2 explorer windows. Bear in mind that this isn't really "backing up". Consider how valuable is your data. External drives can fall off tables, get stolen, or just fail. Valuable data should be kept in more than 1 place.


  • Options
    #3
    jenn1984
    Registered Users Posts: 1,104 ✭✭✭jenn1984


    bonzodog2 wrote: »
    If you just want more space on C, then you can just drag-drop or cut-paste between 2 explorer windows. Bear in mind that this isn't really "backing up". Consider how valuable is your data. External drives can fall off tables, get stolen, or just fail. Valuable data should be kept in more than 1 place.

    It's for work, the back office computer of a shoe shop and it includes the software and data for our ecommerce website so the data is most definitely valuable.


  • Options
    #4
    PropJoe10
    Registered Users Posts: 5,307 ✭✭✭PropJoe10


    Drag and drop is the way to go. And as the last person said, remember that putting stuff onto an external drive only isnt "backing up". Important files should ALWAYS be stored in two different locations. So maybe consider cloud storage if your data is extremely important - MediaFire is a good option, you can earn up to 50GB of cloud storage for free. Or the usual ones like Skydrive or Google Drive.


  • Options
    #5
    bonzodog2
    Registered Users Posts: 6,222 ✭✭✭bonzodog2


    I believe some of the cloud storage options include a 'synching' option, to keep the cloud data always up to date. You could use this for the data (the customer records and stock database etc), and maybe a disk imaging solution on the lines of Norton Ghost et al, for the running local system


  • Options
    #6
    riclad
    Registered Users Posts: 8,184 ✭✭✭riclad


    You cant run windows ,or run programs from an external drive,

    The proper solution is to install a larger drive,
    eg 1 or 2 tb terabyte, 1000gig .
    for a business there should be 3 copys of data,
    eg 2 external drives ,or google drive gdrive,, dropbox etc online storage,
    1tb drive is about 80 euro.
    i don,t know what programs you are using.
    so i don,t know what you can backup.
    buy a proper backup program,
    Then it just backups up new files ,
    ie it does,nt copy the old files that you copied last week.
    it can be setup to backup at a certain time,eg thursday at 6pm every week.
    You can only drag and drop data, not programs .


  • Advertisement
Advertisement