RE: backup to external hard drive

#1 01-05-2006, 06:04 AM

Thanks for all the feedback folks! It looks like I will be buying Norton
Ghost sometime in the near future.

"Ian R" wrote:

> Good morning everyone!
>
> I just bought a 160 GB external HDD for backups on my WXP Home machine ( the
> HDD is connected using USB 2.0). I have read in previous posts that I must
> change the file system on the new drive from FAT32 to NFTS to overcome the 4
> GB barrier imposed by FAT32. I have a couple of questions regarding this....
>
> 1 - Is there an alternative to doing this? I have an old W98SE machine that
> I would like to back up on this HDD as well. Win98 will not recognize an NFTS
> drive, will it?
> 2 -Is it better to just copy essential files onto the backup HDD using
> Windows explorer, or perform a complete C drive backup using the backup
> utility?
> 3 - Is it better to have one HUGE 40 GB backup file(on an NFTS drive), or a
> backup that is split into 10 - 4 GB files( on a FAT 32 drive?) Would I need
> to purchase software to split the backup into 4GB files? Which software is
> best?
> 4 - If I decide to change to NFTS, then can I just reformat the new external
> HDD to make it an NFTS drive? What allocation unit size should I use (there
> are several choices ranging from "default" to 4096 bytes) I know that if I
> reformat the drive, I will lose all data on it... not a problem.
> 5 -Are there any programs out there that backup faster than the backup
> utility that is packaged with WinXP Home? I tried backing up my C drive last
> night and the data transfer rate was about 120 MB/min (which would translate
> into about 6 hours to back up 40 GB)
>
> Thanks,
> Ian

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