Monday, December 30, 2013

My 4TB External Hard Disk Backup System

If you had told me in 1983 that someday, I would have a 4 terabyte external hard disk system for my PC, I would have laughed.  A 5 megabyte hard drive for the PC cost $2000!  At that price per byte, a 4 terabyte drive would cost $1.6 billon!  But now I have one, contentedly backing up my PC.

3 comments:

  1. How/what are you backing up to that 4TB drive. Reading the specs, it notes that because of a limitation of Windows 7, the Windows Image Backup software will not work with the 4TB drive. So are you backing up "data" only, or are you using other software for "image" backups. An image backup of my main PC (OS: Vista) is just 640GB, and a new Lenova laptop (made sure to get Windows 7, not 8) would be just 500 GB, so "little" 1 TB external HD's that can be powered from the computer's USB are what I use. I have 2 and 3 TB drives for data storage (videos, PDF's) as well. I didn't do the math, but I think the drop in the cost of storage you calculate probably has well outstripped "Moore's law." On that, it seems to me that the speed of CPU's seems to have stalled out in the < 3GHz territory, with CPU performance for now only coming by adding additional "cores" to the CPU. The performance of my new laptop (just a week old), while impressive, is actually no better than the desktop machine I purchased five years ago (and am still using).

    Basil

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  2. So far, Windows Backup seems to be working just fine with the 4TB drive. I confess that I do not see exactly how Windows Backup does what it does -- I think I will also have my existing primitive (but clear) backup run as well, which is an XCOPY batch file that copies everything in my Libraries with the modified bit on.

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  3. Windows Backup does not backup to the 4TB drive. Drive size a problem for 32-bit Windows 7? Anyway, Seagate includes a backup program. I confess, I prefer a copy of my files in a format that doesn't require a restore program to read and restore. So I will probably do both.

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