I have a combination Firewire/USB 2 case that I put in a spare 40gig hard drive. Plug it into the firewire port on my laptop to back it up or the USB 2 port on the server. Drive is instantly recognized and I just copy the files over.
I prefer not to use back-up software because I have never had as good of luck restoring from back-up files. I have also used Drive Image to ghost an image over for hard drive partitions. Note, except for ghosting hard drive partitions I generally only copy data files and not programs. That way I don't have to worry about whether or not I'm restoring to the same hardware. Having recently needed to replace a server it I installed the new OS then installed the few other programs that reside on the server. In that case we recycled the hard drives but I still have a back-up on the external drive. Nice thing about the external drive is I can change the hard drive in it whenever I want. When I was getting rid of a couple of old boxes I pulled the drives out, put then one by one in the firewire case and pulled the data off to my hard drive. Wiped the old hard drives, over wrote and wiped again before trashing the hard drive (old 8-20 gig drives). After reorganizing the data I burned some cds, copied some files back to the external drive after restoring the larger hard drive to the case. One of these days I'll probably put in one of the really large hard drives. Case cost me around $50. If you don't want to bother with putting your own drive in it (connecting 2 cables and 4-8 screws) you can buy external drives in most computer stores. That's also where I got the empty case. Cheryl D. Wise MS-MVP-FrontPage www.wiserways.com mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 713.353.0139 Office -----Original Message----- From: puterbug Just wondering if anyone out there would mind sharing their expertise as to the best way to set up an external hard drive for backup purposes. What hardware does one need to do this via USB connection? What software is recommended to use for the backups? How do I determine what size external drive I need? Any pitfalls or warnings? Can a hardware dummy (like me) do this without trouble? Whatever you wish to share I want to hear, thanks! ____ � The WDVL Discussion List from WDVL.COM � ____ To Join wdvltalk, Send An Email To: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Send Your Posts To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To set a personal password send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the words: "set WDVLTALK pw=yourpassword" in the body of the email. To change subscription settings to the wdvltalk digest version: http://wdvl.internet.com/WDVL/Forum/#sub ________________ http://www.wdvl.com _______________________ You are currently subscribed to wdvltalk as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
