K
kingrob
Guest
Recently I got a bit worried when a friend's pc just died and he lost all his files. He actually had two 1TB hard drives in his pc, but the whole pc was damaged and so were the hard drives.
I had a look around and realized that there are so many backup solutions available, but what if you only want a quick and easy way to do it? So I did it & thought I'd share it with members looking for a similar solution.
So here is how I do it and what I use :
Hardware
1 Intel Core i3 desktop pc with two 1TB hard drives & USB 3.0 ports, one of my hard drives is my "data" drive, where I store all my files. Used to copy it to the OS drive, but not anymore.
1 Western Digital USB 3.0 1TB external hard drive (you can also get a USB 2.0 external drive, but with USB 3.0, you can expect 120MB/s transfer speeds)
Software
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Microsoft SyncToy 64-bit
How to get everything working together
First, start up your pc, plug in your external hard drive and let Windows 7 install the drivers for it.
Next you need to disable USB legacy support in your pc's BIOS & make sure the USB drive is not one of your pc's boot devices, otherwise your pc will take ages to boot.
Download SyncToy from Microsoft's web site, they have 32-bit and 64-bit flavors.
Now create a new folder pair with SyncToy, select your file drive (i.e. "D" drive), choose the external USB drive (i.e. "E" drive, or whatever its drive letter), then choose "Echo". Click "More" and tick "Exclude System Files". That's it.
So when you choose "Run", SyncToy will check all the files on your data drive and copy it to your USB external drive; thus everything that is on your "data" drive, will now also be on your external drive.
The first run will obviously take a while to do, but once its done, SyncToy will only copy new files, update existing files and delete files you have deleted on your data drive.
You can also schedule SyncToy to run at specific times, details on the SyncToy page. Enjoy!
I had a look around and realized that there are so many backup solutions available, but what if you only want a quick and easy way to do it? So I did it & thought I'd share it with members looking for a similar solution.
So here is how I do it and what I use :
Hardware
1 Intel Core i3 desktop pc with two 1TB hard drives & USB 3.0 ports, one of my hard drives is my "data" drive, where I store all my files. Used to copy it to the OS drive, but not anymore.
1 Western Digital USB 3.0 1TB external hard drive (you can also get a USB 2.0 external drive, but with USB 3.0, you can expect 120MB/s transfer speeds)
Software
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Microsoft SyncToy 64-bit
How to get everything working together
First, start up your pc, plug in your external hard drive and let Windows 7 install the drivers for it.
Next you need to disable USB legacy support in your pc's BIOS & make sure the USB drive is not one of your pc's boot devices, otherwise your pc will take ages to boot.
Download SyncToy from Microsoft's web site, they have 32-bit and 64-bit flavors.
Now create a new folder pair with SyncToy, select your file drive (i.e. "D" drive), choose the external USB drive (i.e. "E" drive, or whatever its drive letter), then choose "Echo". Click "More" and tick "Exclude System Files". That's it.
So when you choose "Run", SyncToy will check all the files on your data drive and copy it to your USB external drive; thus everything that is on your "data" drive, will now also be on your external drive.
The first run will obviously take a while to do, but once its done, SyncToy will only copy new files, update existing files and delete files you have deleted on your data drive.
You can also schedule SyncToy to run at specific times, details on the SyncToy page. Enjoy!
