After I get everything straight, protected, etc., I want to back up the hard drive, something I’ve never done. (I back up data on a regular basis, though, on a flash drive.) Any thoughts on a good external hard drive, or will anything work? Seen some references to something called Firewire (think that’s it), but I don’t have that capability on my computer. I want to be able to put the information on another computer too, if when this one goes, I decide to get another computer instead of just a new internal hard drive in this computer. Will that work? (I’ve read it’s not a question of IF a hard drive will fry, but WHEN.) Mine is over five years old, which is probably ancient in computer years.
I’m assuming avast! can check an external hard drive, as it can check my flash drive.
I had a hard drive stop working on me in the computer I had before this one–and, um, I wasn’t in the habit of backing stuff up then. :-[ (Which is when I ordered the Dell I have now.) A couple days later, I heard on a computer radio show about putting a hard drive in the freezer overnight (don’t laugh) and that sometimes would make it work long enough to get anything off that you want. Well, I figured, might as well try it. Sounds ridiculous, but what can it hurt. Took the hard drive out, put it a ziplock back in the freezer overnight, put back in the computer the next day—and it was working again. Don’t want to have to rely on that in the future, though! ;D
I have used Paragon’s Free Software with success.
External drives are easy to connect but even with a USB2.0 port, disk read/write is really slow compared to internal IDE or SATA (If your Dell is now 5 years old it won’t have SATA). Also some on-board USB chips seem prone to errors.
If you are competent, confident and/or have a compliant IT shop, my prefernce would be an internal IDE drive in a removeable tray.
I’ve used the fridge idea too (though not the freezer - it might be too cold) to successfully clone “dead” disks to new ones using old Norton Ghost 2002 (it has switches to ignore errors).
External hard drives are more expensive than internals, but give you the flexibility of easily moving them between systems. If you purchase a Seagate or Maxtor drive you can download and install their backup (imaging) program which is called MaxBlast 5. It is a branded version of Acronis True Image ($$$), but is free for Seagate/Maxtor users.
This Paragon one seems to have a great review on PC World, I see.
I have a partitioned hard drive right now (Dell does that all the time, I think), but if I understand correctly, that just puts your system back to the way it was when it was shipped (which is definitely better than nothing, for sure). My issue with backing up within my computer rather than externally is what if my system crashes to the point that it won’t boot to the point of getting to the recovery program/data?
This statement from PC World regarding Paragon is what I’m thinking: “Make backups to external hard disks for “off the local drive” archival. You can also create a bootable USB Flash drive to recover your PC on demand when the operating system and your native hard drive won’t boot.”
Again, my lack of education here (but increasing) may be why I’m having this issue. I do back up client data daily now (used to be once a week, and before that, egads, once a month :o ), and there other computers around the house I could use, but I just want to protect the stuff on my computer the best way possible since a lot of the stuff on it I use to run my small business. Maybe I’m overkilling here, as I already have the programs disks, and external copies of any work-related program I’ve downloaded.