is a portable hard drive as backup OK?

[mr. bulbous]

For backing up my PTLE session files (all of them: audio files, backups, fades, plugins, etc.) I can not fit them onto CD-R. Obviously I can get rid of a lot of the audio files, clear audio, and clean up the automatic backup files. But I am not ready to do that yet because the sessions are work in progress, and this is making each song file HUGE.

I have a new, compatible 80gb Maxtor 7200rpm HD that I want to use as portable backing device. This will not be part of the PC, but every week I will take it to work, plug in power, and USB cable, and then take it back home, lock it up in a fire proof safe, and feel good about it. This would be as a replacement for backing up much slimmed down versions of my sessions onto CD-R or DVD burners.

My question is: Will using a completely separate “backup” hard drive like this mess my computer up? It is all working great and stable on Windows ME (I know everyone hates ME, but I an comfortable with it) and do not want to take a chance at screwing it up by adding another hard drive (which will be portable and plugged in through USB port. Will I have to enable the USB port in my BIOS? Will it basically set itself up using “plug&play”?

[QuikDraw]

That method should work fine. I hope you're actually referring to USB2 though. USB 1.1 is slooooowwwwwwww. You'd be better off backing up to multiple CD-Rs than waiting for a USB 1.1 data transfer!

I do this now on my WinXP machines. I use both Firewire (IEEE 1394) and USB2. Both interfaces work equally well. One of my external drives has both interfaces on it. One of my WinXP boxes used to run WinME (and Win98 before that). I had no trouble at all with the USB2 drive on the WinME setup. I never tried firewire before I got XP, but I expect it would work on ME as well. The driver for USB drives may be built into ME; I'm not sure about that. I know a driver must be loaded for it to work in 98SE.

Yes, if your USB ports are built into your motherboard you will need to enable them in BIOS for them to work. Plug-n-Play will not find the ports if they're disabled in BIOS (there might be exceptions, but this is normally true). If your USB ports are on a PCI card then you don't need them enabled in BIOS.

By the way, USB2 and Firewire drives also work great for PTLE audio drives.

Hard drives are inherently unreliable. The industry actually refers to them as "disposable" media. I would not entrust long term archival to hard drives. I don't consider hard drives to be a safe enough medium. Files that you absolutely don't want to lose should be on at least two identical optical media or other medium designed for data archival. Hard drives are fine for short term storage though. As long as there is no head crash or other mechanical failure the data should be pretty safe for sevral years, but not indefinitely.

Good luck,

Mike

[where02190]

We record directly to Firedock firewire drives. While you probably won't be able to do this with a USB 1 device, (and if so not with much in the way of performance) you can certainly use it for backup, doing a "Save session copy in", and a firewire or USB 2 device will perform great for both read and write.

[mr. bulbous]

Hey this is exactly what I needed to know! Thanks guys.
The "portable" plug-in hard drive will be constantly updated, deleted, defraged often, so yes, short term only, until I can size down my growing sessions to fit onto cd-r's. It is more of a safety thing than a space thing. Plus, after getting the building broke into, I would hate to lose my computer (and the work) to some thief.

The firedock looks really cool, but I already bought the hard drive to go with the my setup.

I may have USB 2, but I did do some DVD backups, and it took a VERY long time to even get 4 sessions backed up (DVD only fit 3-4 session files), but after it burned the DVD it had some
"varifying" phase that was as long as the actual burning (I could not avoid this phase).

Here is the meat of my system:
Asus a7vx-x
AMD Athlon 2800+ "Barton"
512 RAM
Windows ME

My PC case has a plug in the front for either USB or USB 2 (I am not at my office right now), and my mobo has a plug or 2 in the back...I do not know if they are USB, USB 2, or FireWire (which sounds ideal!). I am new to FireWire: How do I get this to use Firewire? Or even USB 2.0? I thought firewire was Mac thing.