[SOLVED] Looking at External Hard Drives

[DerkontheForum]

I'm building a new PC when my parts get here later this week and while I was at it I was think about making a fresh back up once I get all my important files and OS onto the new PC. A couple questions.

The files I'm considering backing up are everything related to the OS, a couple hundred photos, and a punch of photo copied receipts for my taxes dating back to 2013. My main use for this drive will be to restore my PC to a previous state if something goes wrong down the road and to have a reliable back up of my tax receipts.
Am I missing anything else anyone else would want a back up off?
How big of an external hard drive am I looking at?
SSD or standard hard drive?

 

[jeremyj_83]

I'm building a new PC when my parts get here later this week and while I was at it I was think about making a fresh back up once I get all my important files and OS onto the new PC. A couple questions.

The files I'm considering backing up are everything related to the OS, a couple hundred photos, and a punch of photo copied receipts for my taxes dating back to 2013. My main use for this drive will be to restore my PC to a previous state if something goes wrong down the road and to have a reliable back up of my tax receipts.
Am I missing anything else anyone else would want a back up off?
How big of an external hard drive am I looking at?
SSD or standard hard drive?

Realistically a 1TB drive will probably be enough, but with how cheap the drives are you can go bigger. For an external drive that might sit around and never be used for more than a year you would want a standard HDD. While it is slower than SSD, they do not have to be powered on every year to retain data. SSDs in theory can lose the data if they don't get an electrical charge every yearish. What you can do is use Veeam for Windows Free Edition to do a full backup of the computer and also create a boot ISO that can be stored on the external drive. If something were to happen and you need a full restore, you create a bootable CD or USB from the ISO and then restore from that backup and pointing the recovery software to the external drive.

 

[atljsf]

when i do backups of my pc i copy my user folder and some driver folders, so basically i open documents and settings and find my username, then proceed to copy everything in there, even the hidden and temporary files

depending on waht you have there, could be 500 mbs or 500gbs, only you know what is in there


apart from that folder, and possible some drivers folder, there is not much one needs from a windows installation, unless you created in c: a folder and you put files in there

backups dpeends on how much you want to copy, only you opening that folder and checking how big it is will know what you need, might be more than enough a small 500gbs hard disk, perhaps you need a 12 terabytes hard disk, check properties of the folders you want to save, that will tel you more than what we could

about hard disk vs ssd, for backups, is almost the same, buy a good western digital external hard disk and you will be just fine

ssd is fast for read and wite big files, but for small files that is what basically one often has in the documents folder, desktop, my pictures and similar folder,s both will perform so similar that you won't really feel better for buying a ssd for this purpose