Re: External Hard Drive


Sam wrote:

I bought an 250 GB Iomega external hard drive last month and cloned my
little 30 GB system using Acronis True Image. It took about two hours
to clone.


Uncle Grumpy wrote:
What a WASTE of such a large drive.

You'd be better off to partition that external drive, and to use
Acronis True Image to make an image of your current drive in one of the
partitions.

In my own case, my main drive is an 80GB, I have a second internal of
30GB, and a 120GB external.

I clone the main drive weekly to the second internal drive, and use the
external drive for images, and other things (five partitions).



"Sam" <samsarak@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:OMGSYgqTGHA.4132@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
It was on sale.

I don't understand why you say I'm wasting it. I intend to keep on
filling it up. What I want to do is save all the images and documents for
my children to have 20 years from now.

I'm trying to figure out what partitioning really does. Seems like a
partition is just like a large file. If my hard drive fails, all the
partitions fail, correct?

True Image made two partitions even though I didn't ask it to. It made an
exact copy of my computer. You suggest partitioning my external drive.
What should I do with the extra partitions?

Another question I have is, when you clone each week, do you erase the
previous clone first?

Thanks for replying.


Sam:
First of all, it's fine to use your USB external HD as a storage device,
including cloning the contents of your internal HD to that USBEHD for backup
purposes. Understand that when you use a disk imaging program such as
Acronis True Image to perform the cloning operation whatever prior contents
were on the USBEHD will be replaced by the new clone. This is an automatic
process - you need not "erase" the previous cloned contents on that drive.

With the relative costs of large-capacity HDs so low these days, there's
certainly no major negative in having a 250 GB HD as your external HD. I
suppose it's reasonable to assume that by & by you'll be replacing your 30
GB internal HD with a considerably larger one, so the now-extra capacity of
your external drive will certainly come in handy at some future date.

Now as to the clone you created...

Why it took two hours to perform the cloning operation I don't know. You
didn't indicate the volume of data on your source disk, but assuming you
were cloning, for example, 20 GB of data, it shouldn't have taken you more
than an hour, if that. (I'm assuming your computer has USB 2.0 capability as
I'm certain your USB device has). With a "modern" machine, i.e., processor &
HDs, cloning speed in this instance should be about 400 to 450 MB/min.

A clone is a clone is a clone. When you make a direct disk-to-disk clone as
you apparently did, whatever partitions that are on your source disk will be
cloned to the destination disk. So if your USBEHD has two partitions
following the cloning operation, then your internal (source) drive contains
two partitions. Is it possible that your computer is an OEM machine and
contains a so-called "recovery" partition placed there by the manufacturer?

There is really no need to manually partition your USBEHD if your basic
objective is to use that device solely as a simple recipient of the cloned
contents of your internal (source) HD. If, however, for one reason or
another you determine that another partition would be useful on that
external drive for some sort of ancillary storage capability, then you are
free to create that partition. But there's a problem in doing so with the
ATI program (at least with the version 8 program - I don't know if there's
any difference with the newer version 9 edition). Based on my experience
with that program, ATI will not allow partition-to-partition cloning, at
least with respect to *direct* disk-to-disk cloning operations. It's an "all
or nothing" proposition in the sense that when you clone the contents of
your internal HD to your USBEHD, whatever partitions that were previously
created on the external drive will be deleted as I mentioned above. There
are some disk imaging programs that have the capability to clone on a
partition-to-partition basis but to the best of my knowledge the ATI program
does not provide this capability.

As to your question "If my hard drive fails, all the partitions fail,
correct?", you bet they do.

You're most certainly on the right track in terms of using a disk imaging
program to clone the contents of your internal working HD as a systematic
and effective backup tool.

Retry the cloning process and see if it you're still experiencing problems
with the untoward amount of time it's taking to complete the process. If
you're still having problems let us know, and provide details about your
computer, operating system, how you're undertaking the process, etc. and
we'll see if we can help you.
Anna


.

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