TSGL: External USB HDD for Backup??

[Russell W. Coover]

Tilman,

You are correct if you are speaking of an external drive in which the hard
drive cannot be taken out of the the external USB enclosure. If, however,
you can take the drive out of the enclosure and place it internally within
the computer, you should be able to boot from the drive. Or, you can place a
new drive internally in the computer and use Acronis to copy (clone) from
the external drive. I've done this both ways, and both work fine.

Russ

-----Original Message-----
From: list-bounces at tsgserver.com [mailto:list-bounces at tsgserver.com] On
Behalf Of Tilman Brandl
Sent: Thursday, September 27, 2007 3:11 AM
To: Tech Support Guy Mailing List
Subject: Re: TSGL: External USB HDD for Backup??

Lee,

I don't know whether this has been mentioned already: An external USB for
backups is not a bad idea. BUT:

If I understand this correctly the main drawback is that you can use it to
backup DATA, but not that easily to backup an image e.g. of your SYSTEM
partition AND get it back to work straight away. The reason is, that in case
of a system failure you won't have a working system that can access any USB
externals and thus images you might have on that ext. drive. 

Might be different if you put a system image on - let's say - DVDs. If you
do that, you won't probably need an external drive, depending on how many
(non-system) data you have to backup.

The latter leads to Acronis or any of the free Acronis versions/offsprings.
I'm using it myself, wouldn't need it just for my data - other, cheaper or
free software could do this well enough. As it is now, I hope that I'll be
able to get my system image back if the system fails one day, in a matter of
minutes. This'll work because the backup image is on a different partition
and can get played back using an Acronis CD.

I doubt that you could do this from an USB drive if there are no USB drivers
installed before

That's all.

Good luck
Tilman
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Lee Bunyard 
  To: Tech Support Guy Mailing List 
  Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2007 4:57 PM
  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
_______________________________________________
Tech Support Guy Mailing List
http://www.tsgserver.com/list/