Portable back-up device

[Antonio Correia]

I am planning to buy a Toshiba Canvio 3.0 Portable USB Hard Drive of 1 TB to use as back up device for all the photographs I have.

I do not intend to use DropBox or similar cloud service.

However, I would like to know if I can use it as a diff or else I will have to copy the files all the time, over and over.

I have been looking for this info but I have not seen it or I have missed it

Do you have any experience with this kind of equipment ? Would you please share it with us all ?

Thank you

[Stevewebb]

I looked into it a while ago Antonio because I wanted to sync a portable hard disk with two computers. I couldn't find any free software that did this but there are plenty of pay versions available. In the end I gave up but must get it sorted.

I just searched again and this gets good commenst for a freeware.

www.freecommander.com/

[Barry]

I back up onto two separate external hard drives (these are both mirrors of each other) buy just using copy and paste.

[Antonio Correia]

Thank you both.

I want this drive not only as a back-up but a way to "link" two Mac, the one from home and the other one which is to move around.

This way I have a portable drive which I can take anywhere with all the docs, images etc. No cloud, no.

However, Barry the system of copy and paste is not good. Excuse me
Well, it looks as so to me. Perhaps I am wrong and why ?

Because everytime you make a change or make multiple changes you have to copy the hole stuff over and repeat the processus over and over.

Using the diff - Which I didn't know of until today - makes the best solution.

But I have already two drives on the table: an iomega of 1 TB and a Lacie of 500 GB. The first one is to be used with the time machine, which I update every 8 days or so. The other is only for the images of 2012.

My issue is that I want to move around on the MacBook with all my stuff. And I feel I can do it with the Toshiba which is small.

Have I been confusing ?

[Barry]

I see what you mean now, I have a small 250GB WD Passport which will fit in my pocket and can plug into any PC.

As for my Back Up, every time I download the camera to my PC, I make a new folder with a prefix number like 1345 and download all my camera images into it, then whenever I open uo a image from that folder it will then be renamed with the prefix of the folder followed by the image number like 1345-2987.tiff, that way if I ever want to go back to the original file I know exactly what folder it is in. As for backing up, I only need to copy that folder and paste it into my two external hard drives.

[Antonio Correia]

Thank you Barry

You are doing great. But I store the photographs by date. inside 2012 I have ... you can see here. It is easier

In LR when I am working on Catalogues I get photos from everywhere inside the computer. To back them up I should use the diff to make things easier.

I am already - silly me - copying with replacement all the 2012 folders into the external drive from time to time.

It is not a solution I know.

I also read about Seagate GoFlex : looks great, great !!! I am not sure if they sell in Portugal. I am going to make a search about this. I do not know about it's size however... and this is a main concern !

www.amazon.co.uk/Seagate-FreeAgent-GoFlex-Ultra-portable-External/dp/B003NE5H2G/ref=dp_cp_ob_computers_title_0


www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/external/external-hard-drive/portable-hard-drive/

[Barry]

As it is now a new tax year for me, I will be buying a couple more external hard drives, and I believe that the WD ones are now coming with some sort of back up software.

[Antonio Correia]

I bought the Toshiba Canvio 3.0 Portable USB Hard Drive for 120 € - us.toshiba.com/computers/storage/portable/canvio-3/ - 1TB.

It uses USB 3.0 and it is fast.