External Hardrive/Backup Software

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A couple years ago, someone posted a link to an online store that sold external hardrives and backup software together for an incredible deal. I tried searching all over to no avail. Does anyone know about that deal??? Or, anyone have a recommendation? One with software that will do a full drive backup like Ghost? Thanks.
 
Buy a regular hardrive and then a USB2 adaptor for it. The adaptor powers up the hard drive and then connects it by usb. I use this to back up my boot drive once a week. Handy and only costs 20 bucks and shipping. Can be used with a dvd drive/burner or cd burner too.

www.geeks.com

Dan
 
http://www.newegg.com/ProductSort/SubCategory.asp?SubCategory=414

There's the already-packaged external hard drives and many come with pre-installed software for performing back-ups. That pre-installed software is of varying quality.

Ol' Dan has a great idea. Poke around and you can find cases for an internal hard drive you shove the hard drive into, connect a plug, then with the two cables that plug into the rear of the case plug into a power supply and the USB thingy on the back (or front, if there) of your coumputer.

My Win98 SE (later, XP) detected the critter and it worked devinely with no problems. Turn it off and on willy nilly and the E drive letter appears allowing me to access the external drive easily and quickly. I love it!!!! Grabbed a 160 gigabyte drive and back stuff up regularly.

Been using Karen's Replicator for its ease of use and it's FREE!!! Karen's is a reliable well-known site and I've used her goodies off-and-on for a long time. Still, it's always a good idea to run an anti-viral scan on any downloaded goody due to the off-chance a hacker broke in and inserted hostile code(not likely but.....) oh... it's just a good idea to scan everything!!!

Karen's Replicator is good for normal day-to-day file and folder back-ups.

http://www.karenware.com/powertools/powertools.asp

Recommended by the Pricelessware bunch of free software seeking folks:

http://www.pricelesswarehome.org/

(links to many free softwares. archives for previous years mentions)

After reading many reviews by various computer stuff writers (the pros) and reviews by various users I wandered over to Acronis True Image

http://www.acronis.com/

and poked around. Amazon.com had it for a penny less than 40 bux with free shipping so.... wanting to be able to back-up my entire main hard drive with all the operating system etc. goodies on it, I figured I needed to lose a few pounds so could go without a few meals in order to buy the program.

In a few days I will hoist my blubbery body aloft (akin to boulders removed from holes in a side yard or a Rex the Wonder lizard emerging from a drain) and stagger down to the office of post and retrieve the little key within my little rented rectangular receptacle of mail and access the nearby larger receptacle where my Acronis from Amazon will be calling out to me....."Obbop.....Obbop....come and get me you BIG hunk of man) Hope it's a female-type program.

Will waddle back to the shanty and partake of the program, utilizing the external hard drive and achieving, hopefully, back-up Nirvana that results in paroxysms of sensuous delight pervading my innermost essence.

If ye buys an external hard drive and want to attain back-up delight and ye goes with a set-up with built-in back-up software ensure ye checks out some reviews for that software. Accoring to reviews some of those programs are marginal, not user-friendly, have a tendency to crash thine system etc. Others are reviewed as being mighty fine. Of course, what works or doesn't work can vary from computer to computer for various reasons, such as the programs already installed, operating system used, etc.

Good luck!!!!!
 
The Backup Program that comes with Windows works pretty well. I use it with an USB2 External Western Digital 250GB drive.
 
Well, I had a Seagate on the way but I canceled my order and now have an Apricorn 80 gig on the way. It comes with their proprietary EZ Gig II disk cloning and imaging software that's supposedly really good and easy, although it pales in comparison to Acronis. The EZ Gig II doesn't do differential/incremental back ups, just a full on disk image or clone. That's really all I need as I'll use the Windows backup for doing simple file/music/video and pictures.

Hopefully the Apricorn isn't a hunk o crud as an 80 gig with 8mb cache and 7200 rpm was cheaper than a 40 gig Seagate!

Hey, thanks for the help and info guys. By the way, I searched in the general forum and there was a ton of info about backup/external drives. If anyone needs info, that's a good place to look.
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OH MY GOSH!!! I just got done installing my new hard drive.

With EZ GIG II and the Apricorn hard drive, it was the easiest thing in the world. The EZ Gig II software is a stripped down version of Acronis True Image. After researching things a bit, cloning is not the most reliable thing with any software, so, I just made a disk image of my old drive (thank *** I got it to boot one more time), put the image on the external drive, got the new internal hard drive in, booted EZ Gig II from disk, and restored the image. Took 30 minutes!!!
So far, the system is flawless.

Also, from what I've been reading, the most reliable way to backup with imaging software is to boot from the CD and run the software that way (not from within windows). Many guys don't even use differential backup or individual file backup with Acronis, all they do is make a full image from the boot CD. Well, EZ GIG II IS Acronis True Image without differential backup and a few other features so it's perfect!

If you need backup software and an external drive, look no further than Apricorn
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quote:

Originally posted by sprintman:
Why not buy the real thing (Acronis)? I'm missing something here...s

You are missing something. Read my post!!! Acronis in and of itself cost half what my entire external USB Apricorn hard drive and EZ Gig II software cost.

Like I said also, people are having issues with the differential backup in Acronis and with entire images when you run the software from within windows. If you run it from a boot CD and simply make a full image, it works great. Well, that's about all EX Gig II does, so why shell out the dough for Acronis?
 
By boot CD, I mean just running the program from the CD when you first boot the computer. You can also make a separate boot CD if you loose the original or if you download Acronis. I didn't mean to jump on you sprint.
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But like I said, if you looking for a backup solution, I'd have to say the Apricorn setup is the best as you get software and the hard drive together. It sure feels nice having an entire image of my system configured exactly how I want it etc. if the system goes kaput. With the EZ Gig software, you can also look through an image and restore individual files as well.
 
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