I have two computer questions / product advise. First, I am getting to the point where I have a lot of serious stuff on my HD now (music, photos, etc.) that I am concerned about backing up. What is the best way to do this? External hard-drive? Ghosting? I know little about either. Second, I also have a lot of printed photos pre-digital era I want to get scanned. Plus, I just need a scanner for other reasons. Anyone have an advise on a good scanner. Especially if it makes it easy to scan a lot of photos. Thanks in advance. JZ
Not sure on the scanner but i think an external HD would be great for backing stuff up. USB hard drive enclosures with a standard HD seem to be cheaper. If you have an old HD laying around you can just get a USB enclosure for it.
Biggest reason HDs go out is power fluctuations. Even if you can't see it, your power is constantly fluctuating. Get a good UPS. It will give you an even stream of power. I have a UPS on every piece of equipment in my home, and I've never lost a hard drive.
I just bought a 160GB Seagate USB external drive from Best Buy for about $160.00. I also have backup software called "BounceBack". It allows me to back up the drive (it essentially just copies and doesn't use proprietary formats or compression so you can drag/drop without using the software if you want) and then run incremental backups where only the changed files are saved. The original backup took about 35 minutes for 21 GB and the incrementals take maybe 5 minutes depending upon how much data has been added/changed. I have mine scheduled to run automatically every other day at 3:00 AM. This is on Windows XP with USB 2.0. The software also allows for the formatting of the drive so that it can be bootable if your BIOS supports boot from USB device. This is not working for me but I have not done any real analysis into why.
