External Hard-drive Questions

In order to have some piece of mind, I decided to purchase a external hard-drive to back up all my info on my PC> I purchased a Cavalry 500GB (Preformatted NFTS) USB 2.0 hard-drive with aluminum casing from newegg. It is a very nice piece.

My questions:
1.) Can hard drives be places in an upright position or should they stay in a horizontal position? This one has a removable stand, so I was wondering if placing in any other position will hurt it.
2.) Should I simply copy my entire "c: drive" or should I sift through and copy only folders? (documents, music, etc, etc)
3.) Is there a way to copy downloaded programs (like freeware?)

Any other tips? Thanks in advance.

Position should not bother a thing, as long as it is not knocked over.

If you have a program Like Ghost or Acronis true image, you can backup everything on your computer, OS and all.
Or Do like I do, just copy and paste what I would hate to lose.

I do have my OS backed up to dvds, just not to a hdd.

You should know though, without Acronis or Ghost you can't just copy programs over to the new drive. If you try this, the programs won't work anymore. Programs install stuff in the registry, and you could never find all the bits and pieces.

Yes downloaded programs like free ware. The actual install program that you downloaded can be copied to another drive and then installed onto the pc from the copied file. However you can't copy a installed program in most cases As photolady says.
Just copy the downloaded file that installs the program, will work most of the time.

So are you saying I cannot just "right click" on MY COMPUTER and copy the entire "C" drive and paste into my new ext. hard-drive? That is not sufficent for the OS and programs should I need to save them?

You got it right, that will not work. That is the reason we listed a couple programs which will do it. The work comes in when we try to figure out what will do what we want so we do not lose stuff.

Some of us back up to multiple computers, cds and dvds plus removable hdds.

All kinds of options available, but figuring out what we want can be a pain. :(

No, you cannot make a copy of your entire C Drive. You cannot copy files that are in use (most of the Windows and System32 directory), and you would not be getting the boot sector. That's why you need an app like GHOST, which makes an exact image of your computer. If something goes wrong and you need to replace your internal hard drive, all you need to do is put the new drive in and put the image back with GHOST.

TB

Interesting....
where can I get these programs like GHOST?

A lot of brick and mortor stores carry both.
Ordered on line Example for TI http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16832200004

Ok with the disk image can you place that on any HD and start back up? Or must it be placed back on the original drive with the data in place? I just never understand how an image can contain a whole drive in such a small backup.

A disk image can be placed on another hdd, cd/dvd or even on another computer in some cases. But you can not put the image on the Boot drive/partition.

Believe us, a image can hold all kinds of stuff. If I were to image right now, I would need 5 single layer dvds.

Acronis has a boot cd you have to make and as I use Ghost 2003, I have a boot floppy.
Boot to that and start your image back. {kind of over simplified but close, then the program will rewrite everything back to the boot drive.

Acronis will probably be better for you, because I use Ghost 2003 from the DOS side.

Both will also let you clone to another hdd also.