Computer on line back up

path1 wrote:
OP here... Thanks for all the help. Ok I'm going to go with external drive after reading the postings. Let me know if I'm right or wrong with the following question because in the past I had a tape back up and when old computer failed could not put data into new computer for some reason.

Question... With an external hard drive I can just unplug the external hard drive and take to other computer and put on my data on that different computer.
Is that right or wrong (assuming that I also put software into alternate computer prior to first computer failing).

Thanks for all the help.

External drives can be moved from one PC to another which is one of the advantages they have.

In the older days of tape backups, you were typically "locked in" to a specific brand/type of tape, tape drive unit AND tape backup software. The problem with that was if the drive or drive controller failed and you were not able to locate another of the same model your backups became doorstops. Often times older tape drives became obsolete due to proprietary hardware which was not usable on newer PCs or the tapes were no longer made.

Tape backups also often backed up the entire hard drive including the OS, often not a problem with DOS but when Windows 95 that came to a screeching halt. You simply could not restore a Windows 95 OS onto a different PC without spending hrs fixing hardware errors and even then it might be unstable. DOS was easy to move to a new PC, it had no care in the world for drivers, it was happy to be moved to a newer and faster PC.

Back to the external USB drive... You have several choices for backing up your files.

You can simply COPY the files you want to "save" to the external drive by basically making a folder on the drive then drag and drop the files from the MY DOCUMENTS folder. It requires no software but does require you manually do this on a regular basis.

Alternate way is to use a backup software which allows you to setup a backup schedule. Once the schedule is created the software will do the backups for you automatically.

The downside to this is you will need to make sure you keep a copy of the backup software in case you have to reload your PC from scratch. The reason for this is a lot of backup software will create a backup file which can be only read from that software.

Not sure if they are still making backup software but Winzip actually created a backup software suite of tools which backed up your data as a ZIP file (which can be opened by a lot of software including XP, Win7). It also gave the choice to password protect the ZIP files for additional security. Could check into that one..