Partitioning a new HDD

Discussion in 'Computers and Consoles' started by stella, Dec 31, 2013.

  1. stella

    stella Forum Junkie

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    I've bought a 3Tb external hard drive for backing up. I tend to drag things across to it rather than do a compressed back up.

    Is it too large/unwieldy? (I've been told that it will be very slow if I use it as a 3Tb drive) Should I partition it?
     
  2. MUSHY 16V

    MUSHY 16V Moderator Staff Member Moderator

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    You could but it's not going to make it any faster
    I think it will be fine for what you want
     
  3. Deako Paid Member Paid Member

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    Should be fine. Plenty of NAS/USB drives with 3tb disks and more. Who said it would be slow out of interest?

    I mean, it's not going to be 15k rpm fibre channel disk fast, but assuming you will only be using USB 2.0, you will unlikely hit a bottleneck.
     
  4. stella

    stella Forum Junkie

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    Thanks both. The external disk and PC are USB but I won't be using it that often.

    However, one of the reasons was that the 2Tb drive in my PC is partitioned into three - two for storage and back ups and the third has the OS and programs on it. The idea of this was that I could format a partition if/when I wanted to, without having to overwrite all the data on the other two partitions.
     
  5. Deako Paid Member Paid Member

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    If you are running windows 7 there is a very good backup utlity built right into the OS, that can perform scheduled backups of files/folders of your choosing.

    But you needn't partition the external drive for this. Only disadvantage is that the files are only readable in a recovery operation, you cant really browse and access the files.

    Having the partitions on your primary drive is a good idea in theory, but as far as disaster recovery goes, still offers no protection. Most PCs these days offer raid configuration. You could easily setup 2x internal hard drives in a Raid1 mirror. Which would provide some reassurances for your OS being kept intact, and then you could further enhance this with your external backup.

    In my opinion, i would just have 1 hard drive partition then install some data mirroring software to replicate certain files/folders on to your external hard drive. As you already have all the kit for this, it would be a simple solution.
     
  6. rubjonny

    rubjonny Administrator Staff Member Admin

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    i use a free tool called syncback for my backup, great little proggy:
    http://www.2brightsparks.com/download-syncbackfree.html

    if i ever have to rebuild my pc i first boot into a Windows PE recovery CD (BartPE is a good one) then I rename the windows, program files and users folders. that way you can do a full clean install of windows without deleting any of your data or qworrying that you might have missed something when backing up all your stuff.

    then once the install is finished move all the files from the renamed folders as required, i find that 99% of the programs I install can just be put back where they were along with the start menu shortcuts and they'll sort themselves out without having to restore the registry etc. worst case just re-install over the top. you can even go into the user folder and copy the user setting folders back to retain the settings for most of them as well.

    granted the windows restore and/or some other 3rd party backup tools can do this for you but I prefer to do it manually so i can control what bits are copied over rather than just moving everything over as there might be many random files left over you dont need any more etc.
     

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