I'm getting there. So, you need two new drives. One for the image file and another for restoring that image to. Sorry for being so thick between the ears. It's a totally new process for me. I can talk about post processing photographs and how to do it all day but some things take a bit to sink in.
You don't necessarily need any new drives.
You need at least 1, preferably 2 working drives. Whether new or old.
You could store the image file of C on another partition on the drive containing C. And later restore to the same C if that drive still works.
It's better than nothing but not recommended. Why? Because if the drive containing C fails outright, you would lose all partitions on it--including the separate partition containing the image file. If C just becomes corrupted but the drive is still usable, you could still restore the image file to C.
The much preferred method is to store the image file on a separate drive entirely. If the drive containing C then fails completely, you can still restore to a new drive by accessing the image file stored on the separate drive.
I've only experienced one drive failure back around 2006. It was a Seagate Barracuda drive in an XP machine. I kept hearing a strange noise, sort of a grating sound and decided I needed to do something pretty quick. Back then I had a setup that would clone the entire drive and did exactly that, took the potentially bad drive out and replaced it with the new cloned one. It worked great.
I hope I don't have to try out this system we've been discussing. However, these drives could last two weeks or five years. It's a crap shoot if you don't back up.
I got the docking station from NewEgg today and in the process of setting it up, formatting, etc. It's been fifteen minutes now and we're still only up to 5% on the formatting. This may take a while. I'm glad it's just a 500G drive I can imagine how long it would take for a 2TB drive.
Under "Format Partition" Format this Volume...was checked as was "Perform a quick format". This is USB 2.0, of course.
I agree here. You might be better off getting something like a 1 or 2TB Western digital my book external usb drive. I have a 1tb my book drive that I use to constantly back up my whole system because it automatically backs up any files and or folders it senses have had changes to. And the my book drives are not overly expensive right now either. They have come down quite a bit over the past several years.
I had a My Book once with an older XP machine and it slowed the computer down worse than Norton Internet Security. I sold it.
ColColt,
A couple of backup HDDs won't set you back much.
You are far better off with your docking station. I have a number of My Book Essentials bought before I realized their problems:
1) unreliable micro USB 3/2 connector
2) hardware data encryption
If the connector or USB to sata interface card fails (as they do) you cannot simply remove the sata drive to recover your data because it has been encrypted. I think WD's Elements range is the only one that doesn't use hardware encryption. Even then for the 2.5" drives they now don't use an internally sata connected drive.
When it comes to the sata drive for your docking station I think WD is fine. For backup purposes I find the WD Green 2TB good value for backup at ~$80. A couple of these for your images and data/photos is all you need.
It's rather odd in Device Manager the drive doesn't show up as a WD drive like the one for my digital photos. It shows as an "ASMT 2105 USB Devise".
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