Until my Western Digital external USB "MyBook" HD quit working ... I
had a good backup strategy for THREE computers:
I made a partition on the external drive just for backups. I used a
backup/imaging program (I chose Acronis True Image) and made an image
of each computer and saved it to the partition. Then I made
incremental backups from time to time. The incremental backups
updated the original backup to reflect deleted, changed, and added
files. It was easy.
I didn't worry about synchronizing. What I wanted was the ability to
restore each computer to its pre-disaster state. Synchronizing can
always be done between computers, if you like. And the incremental
backups made after a synchro will reflect the synchronization.
Now, I just have to rescue my external USB HD ... :-(
Lady Dungeness
Crabby, but Great Legs!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
|Bob wrote:
|> I bought a Maxtor One Touch III Mini Edition external hard drive.
|>
|> I used it to back up my important data on my desktop computer which
|> runs Windows XP.
|>
|> Can I use this same hard drive to back up my laptop, also running
|> Windows XP?
|>
|> Now, this becomes a two-part question:
|>
|> 1. Can I keep the data from the two computers separate, if I wanted?
|>
|> 2. What I really want to do is get all my important files on both
|> computers. If I did this every other week or so, I'd have almost all
|> my emails and documents available to me regardless of which computer
|> they were created on. Ideally, I'd have my data on both computers and
|> then a backup on the external hard drive.
|>
|> I thought this would be an easy question, but I've searched the Web
|> and Groups and don't find a specific answer.
|>
|> Maybe the laptop needs to first be synchronized with the desktop (but
|> I don't know how to do that either) and then one or the other saved to
|> the external hard drive.
|>
|> Thanks for any and all help.
|>
|
|There are many ways to arrange data on disks.
|
|1) If you are backing up files by hand, you copy them from your internal
| drive to the external. You could use a separate directory for each
| backup operation, like "desktop_Aug06_2007" or "laptop_Aug06_2007".
|
| An alternative, would be to place multiple partitions on the external
| disk, to segregate the files that way. I don't see much benefit to
| that, unless yet another backup step is planned, where the partition
| organizes groups of stuff for backup to other media.
|
|2) If you use a backup program, some of those create the equivalent of
| a ZIP file. They take a bunch of files, and write them out into one
| huge packaged file. The first backup done, would be called a "full"
| backup, because every file would be stored in the resulting image file.
| The second backup done, would be an "incremental", which only needs
| to have the files that have changed. To "get back" to a particular
| date, means applying the full backup and some number of incremental
| backups. You can store many of those image files on the external
| drive and give them descriptive or systematic names. (For example, I
| used to back up 20 partitions to a single external disk that way,
| as 20 image files. It took several days to get working, but I even
| had the whole operation scripted. Scripting is fine, when everything
| works well, but offers virtually no benefit, if the backup program
| is flaky and has a mind of its own.)
|
|Backup programs provide finer control over what is backed up and when.
|Backup programs also have other features that are useful.
|
|To give an example, Retrospect is a backup program. It gives you two
|things. An image file, containing all your backed up files. And the
|ability to make a boot CD. The purpose of the boot CD, is if you
|fry your C: drive and are no longer able to boot. That "disaster
|recovery" CD allows you to do a "bare metal" restore of the computer,
|which is a nice feature.
|
|Backing up files by hand, ensures you've got the files you've invested
|time in. After all, you can always reinstall Windows, all your programs,
|add in the service packs and security updates, redo all your custom
|settings, prepare template files again and so on. Sounds simple enough.
|But the power of having a "bare metal" restore capability, means not
|having to do any of that. It does take time to prepare the boot CD,
|so there is a cost, but usually the time it takes to do that, is less
|than a full reinstall.
|
|There are other backup programs which can do something like that, but
|without the drama of a boot CD. The list of backup programs or companies
|providing such, is almost infinite...
|
|
http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Backup/
|
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_backup_software
|
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backup_software
|
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backup
|
|And if you were thinking that a ZIP file would be a cheap alternative,
|usually things like ZIP have a finite ability to hold files. If you
|tried to store a million files in a ZIP, it would probably fail. The
|image format used by a backup program, was designed to hold large
|numbers of things. You don't want to find out the hard way, that
|the stuff you put into a ZIP file, had some size or number of files
|limit. In that sense, a backup program is worth the money you pay for
|it. Especially, if you can find reviews of the program, and see
|what other people have experienced.
|
|The worst backup programs, are the ones that don't work on an
|attempted restore. At my old employer, our staff wrote their
|own backup software. We didn't discover it didn't work, until the
|day we tried to do a restore with it
If your data is important,
|there are test cases like that (test restore), that are work trying.
|
|Another test worth doing, applies to tape. If you do backups to
|tape, you want to occasionally check the tapes. We did backups to
|tape for a month, only to find the heads on the tape drive were
|dirty, and all the tapes we made were blank. The tape drive didn't
|seem to mind at all. Some tape drives come with a LED on the
|front panel, that tells you to use the cleaning tape every 30 hours
|or so. From that perspective, your external disk drive is not
|going to get dirty that way.
|
| Paul
