Re: can I back up two computers using one external hard drive?
- From: Paul <nospam@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 06 Aug 2007 02:49:53 -0400
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
.
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