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Originally Posted by Neal Stevens
Question: The Hitachi came with ArcSoft backup (I never used it) and the WD has a trial version of Memeo. So, any suggestions on back up software? Is it worth getting the full version of Memeo? Should I just use ArcSoft for both drives (is it any good)? Why not just drag all the files from C: to a folder in the 1TB drive? Do backup solutuons compress? What do you use?
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I chose not to be a slave to any proprietary file formats and the like so I wrote my own backup application. Does exactly what I want. One click operation. Couldn't be easier.
FWIW I recommend straight copying from source to destination. No need to worry about proprietary compression/file formats then (remember, you must have the proprietary software installed on all machines that you wish to connect the HDD to *plus* with some proprietary formats if one part of the backup file(s) gets corrupted then you can kiss the whole file(s) goodbye). I can take my external HDD and plug it into *any* computer without having to worry about whether it has the appropriate software to read my backups. I turn the drive on, and my files are there ready for me to use "direct".
Doing it this way may take up more space (unless you 7z/FLAC etc everything yourself, which for the most part I do, again making any backup software that compresses redundant), but the convenience and lack of reliance on any specific software more than makes up for it. Plus, with the new (cheap) 1 and 2 TB drives it's not hard to daisy-chain via FireWire.
Another thing to keep in mind, the first thing you *MUST* do if using Windows is reformat the drive to NTFS. I bought a 1TB WD Home Edition today, and this is the first thing I did, and in the process I blew away all the pre-added bloatware cr@p that came with it.
But YMMV...