computer backup methods

[arrabil]

Yeah, they don't advertise the specs on them on purpose it seems. Only the transfer rate. But the higher transfer rates also have the "higher quality" chips in them and it says that in the fine print inside the packaging.

With SanDisk, the blue cards are the standard, then they have black cards, grey cards, and then black with gold. I think they are called Ultra, Extreme, and Extreme Pro.

If you already bought something, I wouldn't give it a second thought and just use it. You might consider a second card to store offsite somewhere though.

 

[IslandTractor]

"higher" grade flash devices are typically faster but not necessarily more reliable. Speed matters for photography but not really for backup so I would suggest getting the size and speed that offers the most bang for the buck. Today that is probably 4 and 8 gigabyte sizes. These things now can be had on sale for ten or fifteen bucks and it might make sense to have more than a single backup of critical files. That way one can be handy and the other safe from house fire etc.

 

[Bird]

Like I said, I'm a computer dummy, just experimenting right now. So far, I've used the CDs and DVDs for my backups; only have them here at home, but in a little fire safe. And I don't do them actually as "backups" but instead make "copies". So this morning is my first experience with a flash drive. When I plugged it in, it came up with a number of questions/options and I went with the defaults; one of which was something called "ReadyBoost" (only available in Windows Vista) that's supposed to speed things up. Now the default showed to reserve almost 3.8 MB but for reasons unknown to me, it actually used up 3.8 GB which of course left very little of that 4 GB of storage for anything else. So I dumped that. And then I found that it's slower than burning CDs or DVDs. I haven't figured out what I'm doing wrong yet, but I'll get there eventually.

 

[arrabil]

"higher" grade flash devices are typically faster but not necessarily more reliable.

How do you think the make them so much faster? Read the fine print of the blue card and an Ultra/Extreme card.

but in a little fire safe

Unless you have a media-rated fire safe they will not survive for long. Paper burns at 412 but media could be destroyed at as little as 100 degrees.

 

[Bird]

Unless you have a media-rated fire safe they will not survive for long. Paper burns at 412 but media could be destroyed at as little as 100 degrees.

Yeah, I know it's not the ideal way to do it, but I'm actually only making backups or copies of my data to have in the event of a hard disk dying. Don't really figure on them surviving a fire, flood, tornado, or earthquake.:laughing: Since I don't have an office to go to anymore, I used to put a spare copy in the car, and I've been known to leave one at a daugher's house, but that doesn't get updated often enough.

Now this flash drive works just fine, but I thought they were supposed to be really fast compared to copying CDs or DVDs, and maybe this is working as it's supposed to. It took nearly 3 minutes to copy 4 music albums that had been loaded into the computer from 4 CDs, and it took 9 minutes, 10 seconds to copy pictures (2,639 items (915 MB)). Does that sound right?

 

[JCB]

No XP Pro here but I do have Service Pack 3. I must have the "special" version of Windows XP Home Edition...

Dmace,

I didnt' mean to give bad information. As far as I knew XP Home never allowed recovery, it was one of the main reasons to upgrade to Pro.

There was a workaround to get Recovery capability on XP Home, and I did it once on an old laptop...but it was a multi-step process (basically a hack) that included editing a couple registry values (whatever those are). It was a sketchy workaround at best and since that time, I never used Home Version again.

Sorry for the bad info.

Joe

 

[2manyrocks]

Music files are going to be slower than word processing files. I only deal with a file or two at a time so I can't speak to downloading 4 albums of content at once. File size has much to do with this.

Then there's the speed of the USB port itself, and I guess speed is also affected by processor speed and operating system.

But those USB flash drives are really convenient. They don't get scratched up and you can easily delete and reuse them.

Newegg will put them on sale every so often, too.

 

[JCB]

Bird,

Speeds are all over place, with many variables. 915MB almost 1GB is really a LOT of data so 9 minutes isn't horrible, but someone will write that it should be faster for some reason.

Flash drives are fine for what you're doing, but they can be erased so I'd really mix in a CD or DVD backup once in while.

I've had a hard drive fail before. People have different priorities, but now I use software and an external drive for daily backups, occasionally make copies to a different external hard drive, and I mix in a CD or DVD of important stuff at least one a year.

Whatever you want to use for backups is probably fine. Having a backup is great. Having a current backup is even better!

Joe

 

[Bird]

Then there's the speed of the USB port itself, and I guess speed is also affected by processor speed and operating system

Yeah, I wasn't thinking and should have mentioned that my HP desktop computer is 3.0 GB of RAM, AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5600+ 2.80 GHz, with USB 2.0 ports front and back. So I plugged in the flash drive to one of the 2 front ports. Apparently all is well; I'd just heard so much about these flash drives that I probably had unrealistic expectations.:laughing: But I'm satisfied and will probably buy another one or two. At least I know now that 4 GB is plenty since I used less than half of it for the stuff I back up.

 

[arrabil]

Bird, you'd don't geekspeak like a newb! I think 100MB/min ~= 1.5MB/s is a decent transfer rate for the lowest speed card.

 

[arrow]

Yeah, I wasn't thinking and should have mentioned that my HP desktop computer is 3.0 GB of RAM, AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5600+ 2.80 GHz, with USB 2.0 ports front and back. So I plugged in the flash drive to one of the 2 front ports. Apparently all is well; I'd just heard so much about these flash drives that I probably had unrealistic expectations.:laughing: But I'm satisfied and will probably buy another one or two. At least I know now that 4 GB is plenty since I used less than half of it for the stuff I back up.

Hope you have extra fans for your processor Bird.

 

[arrow]

2 questions. 1. How do I proceed to backup email files in Yahoo on a flash drive

2. and this has nothing to do with it but I may as well ask now since I'm here and remembered. How does one produce the "grey field" when separating a sentence out of someones paragraph. I mean when you "quote" the entire paragraph, it stays grey but when I want to separate a sentence from someone's previous post, I lose the grey part that denotes the quote. How do I keep the grey field even when not wanting to quote the entire paragraph?

 

[Bird]

I can't answer your first question, but as for the second. You can quote the whole thing, then delete the parts you don't want, or you can highlight and copy what you want to quote, click on the icon above for wraping quote tags around selected text, then put your cursor in between the tags and paste what you had copied. You can do it any way you want so long as you have that text in between (quote) and (/quote) using brackets instead of parentheses.

 

[Dmace]

I didnt' mean to give bad information. As far as I knew XP Home never allowed recovery, it was one of the main reasons to upgrade to Pro.

I wouldn't say you gave bad info, I am sure there are people out there with Windows XP that does not have that option so it's good you brought it up. I found a tech article from Windows that mentions having to install the Backup utility from the Windows XP installation CD so you may have an older version of XP Home that requires that procedure. My only XP machine left (6 month old netbook) has that installed so maybe they do it automatically now. It's all good! :thumbsup:

Yeah, I wasn't thinking and should have mentioned that my HP desktop computer is 3.0 GB of RAM, AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5600+ 2.80 GHz, with USB 2.0 ports front and back. So I plugged in the flash drive to one of the 2 front ports.

Your computer is certainly not the bottleneck so I would assume that the flash drive itself is a little slow on transfer speed but for the price you paid, I would expect that. As previously mentioned, 1.5MB/sec is on the slow side for a flash drive and they certainly come with faster transfer rates. For instance, my Kingston 8GB flash drive can write at 10Mb/sec but cost nearly $40. So your 915Mb transfer would have taken about 2-1/2 minutes on my flash drive. The cheaper models ($15-$20) typically write at 2-6Mb/sec. USB 2.0 can transfer up to 480Mb/sec so that is certainly not the bottleneck either.
The Ready Boost is a feature where Windows Vista can use the flash drive as extra "RAM" but even with USB 2.0 the transfer rates are slow enough to hardly notice any difference in processing speed. It's good if you rarely ever use that much RAM and just need a little "boost" to keep a program from freezing like Photoshop or something but if you need more RAM on a regular basis then get more RAM, Ready Boost is certainly not a replacement for it.

 

[Bird]

The Ready Boost is a feature where Windows Vista can use the flash drive as extra "RAM" but even with USB 2.0 the transfer rates are slow enough to hardly notice any difference in processing speed. It's good if you rarely ever use that much RAM and just need a little "boost" to keep a program from freezing like Photoshop or something but if you need more RAM on a regular basis then get more RAM, Ready Boost is certainly not a replacement for it.

Yeah, I sent an e-mail to my son-in-law and he told me the same thing. I'd never heard of the ReadyBoost and sure don't need it with 3 GB of RAM.

But in talking to sales people, I didn't find anyone who knew of any differences in the flash drives other than the capacity, so I've learned a lot from you guys and I appreciate it. The faster ones would be nice, but the fact is that I have a lot more time then money.:laughing:

 

[arrow]

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I can't answer your first question, but as for the second. You can quote the whole thing, then delete the parts you don't want, or you can highlight and copy what you want to quote, click on the icon above for wraping quote tags around selected text, You can do it any way you want so long as you have that text in between (quote) and (/quote) using brackets instead of parentheses.

Bird, when I click on the multi quote icon, nothing happens. I cut out part of this quote. Lets see if that works

Ok, that worked. It seems one must always retain the quotation marks. See how Dmace quoted several parts? How'd he do dat.

 

[Dmace]

Ok, that worked. It seems one must always retain the quotation marks. See how Dmace quoted several parts? How'd he do dat.

Click the multi-quote icon for each quote you want so they turn orange then when you click the REPLY button on the bottom of the page, all the quotes will be there and you can organize them how you want.

 

[Bird]

[



Bird, when I click on the multi quote icon, nothing happens. I cut out part of this quote. Lets see if that works

Ok, that worked. It seems one must always retain the quotation marks. See how Dmace quoted several parts? How'd he do dat.

I've never used the multi quote icon, so I didn't think about that. I failed to mention that the way I do it is to highlight what I want to quote, right click, then "Copy", then click on "Post Reply" in the lower right corner of the page and the quote icon I was talking about is in that row of icons along the top of the dialog box. If I'm going to quote from several posts, I just scroll back to each post and do the same thing again. I know I'm not explaining it very well, but only because I don't know how.:laughing: