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How to transfer files from PC to external hard disk at a fast speed for back up purpose
Thread poster: Rajan Chopra
Rajan Chopra
Rajan Chopra
India
Local time: 05:15
Member (2008)
English to Hindi
+ ...
Feb 17, 2016

Hi,

I intend to take back up of my files present on PC and for this purpose I have bought an external hard disk consisting of 1000 GBs storage capacity. If I use copy and paste, it consumes so much of time. Further, if this process gets stuck due to some unknown reasons and because of long names of some files, the remaining files are not transferred from PC to external hard disk.

Is there a convenient and fast method to transfer files from a personal computer to an ex
... See more
Hi,

I intend to take back up of my files present on PC and for this purpose I have bought an external hard disk consisting of 1000 GBs storage capacity. If I use copy and paste, it consumes so much of time. Further, if this process gets stuck due to some unknown reasons and because of long names of some files, the remaining files are not transferred from PC to external hard disk.

Is there a convenient and fast method to transfer files from a personal computer to an external hard disk.

Thanks and regards,

Chopra
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Alexander Somin
Alexander Somin
Local time: 02:45
English to Russian
+ ...
SITE LOCALIZER
The Back Up Feature in Settings Feb 17, 2016

If you have Windows 10, please go to SETTINGS and check the Back-Up feature.

 
Rajan Chopra
Rajan Chopra
India
Local time: 05:15
Member (2008)
English to Hindi
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
Thanks for your reply but... Feb 17, 2016

I have Windows Vista.

Alexander Somin wrote:

If you have Windows 10, please go to SETTINGS and check the Back-Up feature.


 
Alexander Somin
Alexander Somin
Local time: 02:45
English to Russian
+ ...
SITE LOCALIZER
Try to find Feb 17, 2016

For Vista, please try to find a back-up software on the web (they may be free of charge).

 
Andrea Garfield-Barkworth
Andrea Garfield-Barkworth  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 00:45
Member (2015)
German to English
Reflect from Macrium Feb 17, 2016

I installed a new harddrive last week and decided I would clone my entire harddrive so that I could immediately get up and running should anything untoward happen. I used Reflect.

You can find it here:
http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

I have programmed it to do a full backup every night and it works really quickly.

I also use a programme called F
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I installed a new harddrive last week and decided I would clone my entire harddrive so that I could immediately get up and running should anything untoward happen. I used Reflect.

You can find it here:
http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

I have programmed it to do a full backup every night and it works really quickly.

I also use a programme called FreeFileSync for backups of various folders and documents, which I sync to an external harddrive. This means I can use this with my laptop when I'm on the go.

This can be found here:
http://www.freefilesync.org/
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Rolf Keller
Rolf Keller
Germany
Local time: 00:45
English to German
Speed wanted? Then avoid file-by-file copies Feb 17, 2016

chopra_2002 wrote:

If I use copy and paste, it consumes so much of time. Further, if this process gets stuck due to some unknown reasons and because of long names of some files, the remaining files are not transferred from PC to external hard disk.


Any file-by-file solution is slow, on principle. If you want it to do this way you should use ROBOCOPY by MS, it's free and will copy all your files in a really reliable manner.

In order to get more speed you have to use a true backup software that copies complete drives bit-by-bit instead of file-by-file. This means that you have to (re-)organize your data, so that all the relevant data (but not much else) reside on one or two dedicated drives .

an external hard disk.


A hard disk? Most people use an USB hard disk just because most vendors offer it as the cheapest solution for private usage scenarios. Some of these gimmicks even get their electric power from the PC – and fail if you inadvertently do something wrong (plug in, plug off etc.) or if your PC doesn't like such electricity "thieves". A more professional & more reliable & faster solution uses a NAS that is connected via LAN cable.


 
Tom in London
Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 23:45
Member (2008)
Italian to English
Clone or die ! Feb 17, 2016

I use Carbon Copy Cloner for the MacOS. It's dead easy. Clones my entire hard drive to an external drive. If anything bad happens I can start my computer from the external drive and keep on working. Or I can clone back from the external drive to my hard drive.

Very handy if you want to clone everything to a new computer.

After the first initial clone, subsequent clones are incremental and only take about 30 mins.

The Best Disk Cloning App for Windows:
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I use Carbon Copy Cloner for the MacOS. It's dead easy. Clones my entire hard drive to an external drive. If anything bad happens I can start my computer from the external drive and keep on working. Or I can clone back from the external drive to my hard drive.

Very handy if you want to clone everything to a new computer.

After the first initial clone, subsequent clones are incremental and only take about 30 mins.

The Best Disk Cloning App for Windows:

http://lifehacker.com/5839753/the-best-disk-cloning-app-for-windows

While we're on the subject:

There are some single-user licensed applications that don't like to be cloned, such as MSOffice. If you boot from a clone, MSOffice will ask you to input your original password (that long thing written on the box).

The same goes for iTunes and other things.

I don't use any CATS but I'd be interested to know what happens if I boot my computer from an external clone and try to run Trados?

[Edited at 2016-02-17 09:16 GMT]
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PAS
PAS  Identity Verified
Local time: 00:45
Polish to English
+ ...
Context! Feb 17, 2016

Is important - not just in translations.

Do you have a desktop PC or a laptop?
If it is a desktop PC, perhaps you have sufficient space in the case to install an HDD drawer and make your backup copies there.
If not, then yes, copying and pasting may be slow, but how many gigabytes of files do you have? Even with USB 2.0, copying 1 GB of files shouldn't take more than 10 minutes or so.

In either case, this is a tedious process because if you copy files manual
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Is important - not just in translations.

Do you have a desktop PC or a laptop?
If it is a desktop PC, perhaps you have sufficient space in the case to install an HDD drawer and make your backup copies there.
If not, then yes, copying and pasting may be slow, but how many gigabytes of files do you have? Even with USB 2.0, copying 1 GB of files shouldn't take more than 10 minutes or so.

In either case, this is a tedious process because if you copy files manually, it is very difficult to make incremental copies (ie add only new files you produced since the time of making the last backup). Basically you need to copy everything you want to back up, every time.

So, the best way to go is to buy (or acquire a free program) some sort of backup software, which will perform these tasks for you automatically. There are all kinds of backup software all over the place. I even found some on an external hard drive I bought recently.
In simple words, you select the folders to back up and tell the software how often to make a back up copy (every day, every week etc.) and where to put the backup copy (on your 1 TB HDD).

///

@Tom
Disk cloning is more for system drives, when you don't want to go through reinstalling everything. I'm not sure it's appropriate for backing up files? (It will work, but is it necessary?)

[Edited at 2016-02-17 09:19 GMT]
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Tom in London
Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 23:45
Member (2008)
Italian to English
EVerything Feb 17, 2016

PAS wrote:

@Tom
Disk cloning is more for system drives, when you don't want to go through reinstalling everything. I'm not sure it's appropriate for backing up files? (It will work, but is it necessary?)


It's for everything, including all system files: E V E R Y T H I N G that's on the hard drive. So it's also a backup. I do it once a day at the end of the day, or more often as the need arises.


 
Rolf Keller
Rolf Keller
Germany
Local time: 00:45
English to German
Full clones are good but can deliver illusory certainty Feb 17, 2016

Tom in London wrote:

It's for everything, including all system files: E V E R Y T H I N G that's on the hard drive. So it's also a backup. I do it once a day at the end of the day, or more often as the need arises.


Just curious: What happens if a file is corrupted, contains wrong data or has been deleted but you become aware of this fact several months later? E. g. a tax-related file or a rarely used but important file? Your disk doesn't provide space for 365 full clones ...


 
Harry Blake Paz Bonzano
Harry Blake Paz Bonzano  Identity Verified
Italy
Local time: 00:45
Member (2014)
Spanish to Italian
+ ...
Transferring only? Feb 17, 2016

As for transferring only you may consider using USB 3.0 compatible HDD and cables. It speeds up a lot!

Another option is NAS device that stores everything in one or more different devices at the same time.


 
DZiW (X)
DZiW (X)
Ukraine
English to Russian
+ ...
iirc Feb 17, 2016

As for me, I prefer using Win7/8.1 system back-ups (restore points) while updating my docs via 7zip to the USB3 stick, SD, or a shared drive; no special/dedicated software.

Regarding the speed, provided you would need a solid archive on a decent storage, for best performance I would recommend sticking to NTFS with 32/64K cluster, which is really faster than default 4K setting, but at expense of the cluster waste (space available), which is just minor nowadays.

As for re
... See more
As for me, I prefer using Win7/8.1 system back-ups (restore points) while updating my docs via 7zip to the USB3 stick, SD, or a shared drive; no special/dedicated software.

Regarding the speed, provided you would need a solid archive on a decent storage, for best performance I would recommend sticking to NTFS with 32/64K cluster, which is really faster than default 4K setting, but at expense of the cluster waste (space available), which is just minor nowadays.

As for regular flash/HDD transfer rate:
- USB1.1 (aka USB-legacy) is limited to 1.5MB/s;
- USB2.0/FireWire -- up to ~25MB/s;
- FireWire800 -- up to 40MB/s;
- USB3.0/eSATA --up to ~130MB/s.

Therefore, either flash, or USB3.0) The point is, if the external HDD has several platters (more than some 320GB), then it may require additional USB2.0 power, which sometimes could be a real nuisance.

I know many people who still use ZIP and CD-RW for back-ups, not my cup)
Also note, that for an external HDD it makes sense to prefer models with 32MB cache size and more.

[Edited at 2016-02-18 06:21 GMT]
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Tom in London
Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 23:45
Member (2008)
Italian to English
No diff Feb 18, 2016

Rolf Keller wrote:

Tom in London wrote:

It's for everything, including all system files: E V E R Y T H I N G that's on the hard drive. So it's also a backup. I do it once a day at the end of the day, or more often as the need arises.


Just curious: What happens if a file is corrupted, contains wrong data or has been deleted but you become aware of this fact several months later? E. g. a tax-related file or a rarely used but important file? Your disk doesn't provide space for 365 full clones ...


There is ONE clone on my external HD. Every once in a while I boot from it and run a few things just to reassure myself.

Re the scenario you depict: CCC will clone whatever it finds on my HD that has been changed since the previous clone. If there is a corrupted file it will clone that too. If there is "wrong data" (whatever that means) on a file, it will clone that too. If a file has been deleted, it will also be deleted on the clone. These are not defects of the cloning process but defects in my ability to manage my own activity.

Cloning my hard drive doesn't absolve me from the requirement not to mess up.


 
Samuel Murray
Samuel Murray  Identity Verified
Netherlands
Local time: 00:45
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
On Macrium Feb 18, 2016

Andrea Garfield-Barkworth wrote:
You can find it here:
http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx


A question I recently asked on the Windows 7 forum got some interesting facts about cloning. In short, cloning is safe, but only if you do it right. If you do it wrong...
http://www.sevenforums.com/general-discussion/391027-can-i-move-hdd-image-another-hdd-few-more-questions.html


 
Tom in London
Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 23:45
Member (2008)
Italian to English
If the application is good Feb 18, 2016

Samuel Murray wrote:

Andrea Garfield-Barkworth wrote:
You can find it here:
http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx


A question I recently asked on the Windows 7 forum got some interesting facts about cloning. In short, cloning is safe, but only if you do it right. If you do it wrong...
http://www.sevenforums.com/general-discussion/391027-can-i-move-hdd-image-another-hdd-few-more-questions.html


If you use a cloning application (for the Mac) such as Carbon Copy Cloner, the application itself makes sure that the clone is an exact...er....carbon copy of your hard drive with everything in exactly the same place. There's nothing you, the user, need to do except run the application, which before it runs will ask you to choose the settings you want.

If you're on Windows there are various alternatives to CCC such as:

http://tinyurl.com/ht7g4xc


"Regular backup is one of the Buddha's Threefold Paths to Wisdom"

[Edited at 2016-02-18 08:49 GMT]


 
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How to transfer files from PC to external hard disk at a fast speed for back up purpose






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