Windows 7 Backup to travel drive

riderj

New Member
Joined
Jan 12, 2012
All my data on the PC is on D:

I want to do two things:
I want to back it up to a WD 3TB drive.
I want to take that drive with me on the road and access the data directly.

Any recommendations?

Thanks for any suggestions
jr
 
My usb backup data drive just gets plugged into the usb port, display the contents of my data drive, ctrl-a, ctrk-c, display my usb drive, ctrl-v. Voila!
 
By backup I hope you mean copy the data to your external. The WD forum is full of people who moved not copied their to an external and thought that was a backup until they had a problem with the external. Then they are upset because they lost important data or their entire audio or movie collection. Also always remember to use the icon to remove drive safely. Just pulling the plug can corrupt the drive.
Joe
 
My usb backup data drive just gets plugged into the usb port, display the contents of my data drive, ctrl-a, ctrk-c, display my usb drive, ctrl-v. Voila!
He's getting a 3TB drive. I suspect he's transferring enough data that copying the whole thing every time he wants to update his backup - hence the need for proper sync software.
By backup I hope you mean copy the data to your external. The WD forum is full of people who moved not copied their to an external and thought that was a backup until they had a problem with the external. Then they are upset because they lost important data or their entire audio or movie collection. Also always remember to use the icon to remove drive safely. Just pulling the plug can corrupt the drive.
Joe
This comment is worth taking seriously. You should have the external sync'ed to your home computer or something else for backup regularly. An external drive you take around with you is orders of magnitude more likely to suffer a failure than an internal drive in a stationary computer. Unlike flash drives (usb flash drives and SD cards), harddrives are quite fragile. Out of 8 hard drive failures i've experienced, half are believed to be due to physical shock or other unknown mishap in transit (in at least some of those cases, the drive was known to have been dropped - i've seen an 8 inch drop trash an external drive!) - of the other 4, 2 lasted ~10 years of continuous use before failing (amazed they lasted that well), 1 got nuked by shorting the circuit board on the bottom (my bad), and the last failed randomly just after the warranty ran out. So of the unexpected drive failures, 4/5 were from physical shock. USB flash drives, on the other hand, are often readable after running them through a clothes washer (you gotta let em dry first, of course).

I back up my external drive to a network drive at home, in addition to syncing my document and media folders to it.
 
I thank you all for the excellent observations. I am out "travelling" and will give a detailed reply tomorrow.
jr
 
DrAzzy, Joe S, and patcooke, thank you for your replies.
Backup was the wrong choice of words, and yes I have a few drives laying around that were dropped (are they doorstops or is there any hope?)
So apparently Synctoy is the answer, and I thank you for the recommendation.
jr
 
If they've been dropped and aren't recognized about the only hope is professional data recovery. It doesn't take much of a bump just having one standing on edge and tipping it over on desk can cause damage.
Joe
 
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