The Official Computer Tech Support Thread

[Freebase Dali]

Originally Posted by Trollheart

Freebase, will this work for all connected drives, incl external ones? I have three: two 1.5 tbs and and 1 tb, plus the installed one (also a tb) -- will the backup system copy all the data from the four drives (assuming I have something large enough to copy it to)? And does it compress the files, or do you literally have to have 1:1 in terms of data space?

I really should do this: I have such bad luck with PCs it's happened before and will surely happen again.

Thanks
TH

You can dictate which drives you want to back up separately, or have them all included in one backup. I would recommend doing each drive separately, because it's not likely they'll all fail at once, and if/when a single drive fails, you won't have to restore everything, and just restore that one drive instead.

As far as backing up external drives, I would assume it would. I don't use externals all that often, so I haven't tried, but it will be apparent when you go to run a backup. The external(s) will either be included in the list of what to back up or not.

Regarding backup compression, Windows will compress whatever is able to be compressed. Whether it will make a significant difference will depend on what you have on your system. If you don't like the size of the backup(s), you can try to compress the image after the fact with something like Winrar or 7zip, where you can modify the compression settings, but this will require you to have to decompress before restoring from the image. Whether or not additional compression will make a significant difference is subject to experiment.

HTH