Backup Hard Drive Needed, Recommendations?

Just purchased a Dell XPS15, (L502X). It has the 750GB WD hard drive. Now I need some sort of backup system. I was thinking of getting one of Western Digital's My Passport Essential external drives. However, they come with WD's own backup program installed on the drive, and I haven't heard too many positive reviews about it. So now I find myself looking for a Plan B.
Any recommendations? Thank you.

 

Basically any external HDD will do. Windows has a built-in backup, You could experiment with it. There are also tons of free backup software available on the Internet. Try out a few and choose one that fits Your needs best.

 

Can these drives that come with preinstalled software be formatted and wiped clean before using? Or will that somehow render it useless with Windows 7?

 

Sure, You can wipe them clean if You wish.

 

I may go that route then. Find a deal on an external drive, format it, then use a cloning program to back up my internal drive.

 

You cannot remove the "WD Smartware" virtual drive from the newer WD My Passports, but you can disable/hide it.

 

The ***best*** software to use is MS's SyncToy.

No messy/hidden/encrypted/compressed version of your data - just a mirror of your (Users) folder with all the benefits (and sometimes 'gotchas') of mirrored renames, deletes and all files ready to be browsed/viewed/restored with only explorer (and no fancy BU software).

***Best here is software at the right price (free), for the most control and least complexity of getting your data back (if/when needed).

Yeah, a WD based external (Seagate BU/External solutions are too sketchy for me), wiped and formatted with NTFS defaults along with SyncToy are a great solution (for a single or (highly recommended) dual external HDD backup strategy).

See:
Download Details - Microsoft Download Center - SyncToy 2.1

Good luck.

 

A cautionary note: Western Digital's latest MyBook offerings perform silent, mandatory hardware encryption. I really cannot understand why they added that "feature." It is in no way a good thing. What it means is that if the MyBook enclosure ever breaks - and they do break, frequently! - your data is GONE.

I bought a 3 TB MyBook Essential 1130 recently. Within a few days of purchase, the MyBook enclosure stopped working in USB 3.0 mode. Yesterday, I removed the 3 TB drive from the MyBook enclosure and installed it in a new Zalman HE-350-U3E enclosure. Sure enough, the drive appeared "unformatted," so I had to apply GPT and format it.

The good part is that I hadn't yet copied any irreplaceable data to the drive, so I didn't lose anything.

 

Thanks for the heads up CoreEye5, I too am leary of any encryption on my machines.

Though the OP is considering the MyPassPort Essentials and if it is the newer SE (USB 3.0) version, I highly recommend them.

Don't know if they are also encrypted? But the half dozen+ I've bought have been bulletproof for months now.

 

I'm not sure about that either. Western Digital doesn't document the mandatory encryption feature on the MyBook, so the only way to find out for the Passport would be to do what I did (crack open the enclosure & hook the drive up independently).

What bothered me was that there was ZERO explanation, either on the box or in product documentation, that the MyBook's hardware encryption is automatic, mandatory, and (apparently) irreversible.

 

That is worrisome.

I truly believe encryption is a waste of time for other than the military/gov't.

Oh well, that is why I buy these things (HDD's) on sale, in quantity and promptly smash them to pieces (warranty=useless with important data on it) when they first start to hiccup on me.

 

Really? Even if I ran KillDisk on it and wrote zeroes to the drive? Isn't that a low-level format that is used to restore the disk to a virgin state, so to speak?

 

I haven't heard of anyone being able to completely remove it yet but that doesn't mean it's impossible. I've just disabled and hidden it on all my externals since it's only about 20MB out of 1TB.

 

Regarding the mandatory encryption, you guys are starting to scare me.
Sounds like more harm than good comes from that. More research on all of this before buying, is what I'm concluding.

 

This is exactly what I didn't know that I needed!

I use a system image for my backups, but need daily backups of certain game saves and a few file configurations, since I prefer to make system images only a few times a month (system restore is for more frequent things). I'm going to enjoy the non-proprietary scheduled backup of these files. Yay!!!

 

What about Acronis True Image Home 2011 as a backup utility? I've heard good things about it as a way to clone drives.

 

I don't understand WD's motives. It must have cost them a fortune to implement that hardware encryption. At the same time, it is of ZERO benefit to the customer.

Encryption absolutely can be beneficial, but only if I control it. For example, I keep all my truly private stuff locked up in TrueCrypt volumes. Those don't depend on a fragile hardware device, or the whims of a 3rd party.

 

CoreEye5,

Did you write TrueCrypt?

 

Troll much? If I insisted on only using software that I personally wrote, I would never be able to use a computer, period. Or drive a reasonably modern car, for that matter.

 

Whoa!

I was just kidding...

Didn't know you were so sensitive.