external hard drive

  Hello everyone,
Hope this is the right place to ask for some dialog. I am interested
an external hard drive to use for storage and also to back up my
entire hard drives using either Acronis or Microsoft's live one care.
I have a main computer (sata) with Vista 32 bit and an IBM laptop with
xp pro and two other desktops, one with xp pro and xp home. And I read
about externals such as Agent with software and would like to know
would just a reg. big external with USB work for me and if I had a
real big problem and had to reinstall would the fact that the back up
is on a USB make a difference. I hope I made myself clear and provided
enough info.
           Thanks in advance

 Posted Via Usenet.com Premium Usenet Newsgroup Services
----------------------------------------------------------
    ** SPEED ** RETENTION ** COMPLETION ** ANONYMITY **
----------------------------------------------------------        
                http://www.usenet.com

 On Mon, 14 May 2007 12:19:11 -0400  'Sog'
posted this onto alt.comp.hardware.homebuilt:


It might depend on what you have backed-up.
I'm not sure you could re-install an op/sys from an external drive
but probably it's ok. Others may know better.

I have an external USB HDD from Western Digital which I use for data
back-up and also for apps which I can use on another PC if necessary.

I have actually replugged the USB HDD into my other PC and it's
recognised immediately. On both systems I assigned it a drive letter
way down the alphabet to avoid drive-letter shuffling problems.

 

Get yourself a nice big external hard drive.
Clean out all the detritus from your machine
ie. Cookies Temp Internet files etc., and use Acronis TI to create an
Image on your External USB.
In Acronis, make sure to Verify the Image.

Do that, weekly, fortnightly, or monthly, to suit your needs.
You`ll always be in a position to recover your System, in about
20-30 minutes.
 I do mine monthly, `cos I don`t change a lot on my System.
And cleaning your machine of crap (I use CCleaner.), means
your not backing up rubbish.

Make sure you create the Acronis Recovery CD first.
With that, you can boot straight to Acronis, to do any recovery.

HTH.