external hard drives

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risky red

I want and external hard drive to back up my system.
can they be used on more than one computer.
what happens if my mother board fails, will the information on the external
hard drive be available on a new computer?

guess I need to know the pit falls here. I would like to be able to get one
big one and back up my 2 computers to cover me for future system crashes
 
risky said:
I want and external hard drive to back up my system.
can they be used on more than one computer.
what happens if my mother board fails, will the information on the
external hard drive be available on a new computer?

guess I need to know the pit falls here. I would like to be able to
get one big one and back up my 2 computers to cover me for future
system crashes
Click to expand...

Yes, of course an external hard drive can be used on different
computers. That's one of the major points of an external hard drive. If
your motherboard fails, you will connect the external drive with your
data to your new computer and have no problems UNLESS you encrypted the
data and didn't back up your encryption keys.

Under normal circumstances (and most people don't encrypt their data),
the external hard drive is a perfect solution for you. I also recommend
burning the data to CD/DVD-R on a regular basis in order to have a
layered backup system.

Malke
 
Sure an external hard drive can be used as a backup. However, assuming you
will be backing up the same files which will overwrite the previous version
you will get only one copy of each file. This is not important unless
either a)you may want to go back to an even earlier version or b)the
external hard drive fails. With a) you may not know you want to use an
earlier version until it's too late. With b)you would have to be very
unlucky to have both hard disks becoming unusable at the same time.
However, there's a lot to be said for respecting Murphy's Law and trying to
reduce the possibility of failure as much as possible.

My preferred system is a streamer tape backup. With this you can backup the
whole of the hard disk (why try to second guess what files you may need in
the future?)- something you can't do to a DVD. Incremental backups (all
files which have changed since the previous backup) takes a few minutes and
give a snapshot of all files over a long period - possibly 6 months per
tape. I also have a small batch file which copies key files to another hard
disk over three days.

For more information have a look at my web site www.1001solutions.co.uk

Regards.

Bill Ridgeway
Computer Solutions
 
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