Seagate Pushbutton Backup question

Mel Culbreath · Post by **Mel Culbreath** » 8 Sep 2005 5:37 pm

I am looking at getting a Seagate Pushbutton Backup external hard drive.

Does anyone here have one of these? I would like to know if you can clone your internal hard drive onto it. I would like to be able to do that so if my main HD crashes I won't have to reinstall all my software and reconfigure all my settings.

Thanks,

Mel

Jeff Agnew · Post by **Jeff Agnew** » 9 Sep 2005 4:30 am

Yes and no. We've used several of these from different manufacturers and they work well, if not quite as simply as the "pushbutton" concept would lead you to believe.

It just uses a hardware button on the external drive to launch the backup software (usually Retrospect) you must install on your computer. You'll still need to configure the software and create an emergency repair disk so that you can restore from the backup archive. Retrospect can walk you through that.

So yes, you can re-create the drive but it will only be as current as your last backup. This is also true of drive imaging programs like Ghost or TrueImage.

The only way to have an instant backup, available at any time, is to configure your PC with RAID Level 1, which is two hard drives with one running as a mirror.

Bottom line, these are good backup tools. Think we paid under $200 for Western Digital or Seagate 250MB external drives at Fry's. Set up Retrospect so it does an automatic incremental backup every day and you'll be ahead of about 98% of computer users (who never or rarely backup their data).

John Daugherty · Post by **John Daugherty** » 9 Sep 2005 12:06 pm

I have cloned hard drives with a simple little program called "xxcopy". It is simply an enhanced version of the dos xcopy command.

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Mel Culbreath · Post by **Mel Culbreath** » 10 Sep 2005 3:32 am

Thanks for the replies.

After reading them I went to Wal-Mart and bought an 80GB Seagate Push Button Backup external hard disk for $105.00 plus tax. The software that came with it is called "Bounce Back Express".

I plan to do a complete backup of my hard disk and then do an incremental backup every day.

I will continue to do a backup of my data, Windows Address Book, and IE Favorites to CD-R every two weeks as an extra precaution.

Mel

Jack Stoner · Post by **Jack Stoner** » 10 Sep 2005 3:44 am

Mel, in reference to "incremental" backups. When I worked we tried incremental backups both on servers and on non-networked standalone PC's. We found the incremental backups did not owrk "as advertised" and ran into many problems trying to restore.

They ultimately abandoned the incremental backups and only did full backups. On our servers they did a full back (to tape) nightly.