TSGL: External USB HDD for Backup??

[Lee Bunyard]

You guys were sure right about doing better on price.  The best price I 
could find on the Internet for a 250 Gig USB External HDD was $85 plus 
shipping.  I ran by the local Costco and Sam's Club this afternoon.  
Costco had the same brand in a 320 Gig for $99, Sam's Club had the 
identical 250 Gig unit for $79.  I bought two of the 250 Gig units.  
Hope to try one out tomorrow.
Thanks for all the advice.
Lee in the Mountains of Northern California

H Davis wrote:
> Lee,
>
> I agree with Russ, you can do better on price. I bought a 250 GB USB 
> drive for $69.95 after a rebate at TigerDirect.com. It's been working 
> fine since then. They still have the same drive (BeyondMicro) for $99 I 
> think.
>
> If you've got an old drive around you can buy just the enclosure for $29 
> or so and use your own drive.
>
> If you have multiple computers on a network you might consider a network 
> drive for your backup. It'll be slower (assuming you have a 10/100 
> Mb/sec LAN and not a gigabit LAN) than the USB drive (480 Mb/sec) but 
> you can back up all your machines to the same drive and use it as a 
> place to swap files between machines. These units are only slightly more 
> expensive. I got a 500 GB unit for $149 at Newegg.
>
> I've found SyncBack (not SyncBackSE) to be a better alternative than 
> Karen's Replicator. Both are free, but if I remember correctly, 
> Replicator doesn't allow you to exclude complete folders from the backup.
>
> Both of these programs are only for backing up files you specify. If you 
> need something that can completely restore a failed machine, including 
> the OS, then you need Acronis or something similar, as Russ mentioned.
>
> H Davis
>
> Russell W. Coover wrote:
>   
>> For backup purposes, an external hard drive is excellent. Depending on the
>> type pf backup you want to do, however, you may have to purchase software.
>> If free software like Karen's Replicator is not sufficient, I suggest
>> Acronis True Image http://acronis.com , which I use everyday (or should I
>> say every morning at 4:00 AM) to produce an exact duplicate of my hard
>> drive. They've just introduced a version 11.
>>
>> As far as $150 for 250 GB, may I suggest you take a look at http://geeks.com
>> for much better deals than that. I just checked and found one 250 GB
>> external drive at $84.99. Or for even a better deal, buy an external hard
>> drive enclosure along with an internal hard drive.
>>
>> By the way, I am not an agent for either Acronis or Geeks.com (located in
>> Vista, CA), just a satisfied customer.
>>
>> Russ Coover 
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: list-bounces at tsgserver.com [mailto:list-bounces at tsgserver.com] On
>> Behalf Of Lee Bunyard
>> Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2007 7:57 AM
>> To: Tech Support Guy Mailing List
>> Subject: TSGL: External USB HDD for Backup??
>>
>> I see where you can now buy a 250 Gig external USB HDD for around $150.  
>> I have about 40% of HDD space still left on my desktop HDD but am 
>> thinking that the external HDD would be good to use as a backup device.  
>> Just wondered if there were any major downsides to using something like 
>> this for primary backup??  Thanks for any thoughts.
>> Lee in the Mountains of Northern California
>>
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