Just bought a 1T Seagate Backup Plus. I am using Seagate Dashboard software. It has backed up my disc. Now I want to see individual songs and picture files. I cannot figure out how to do that. I can go through the restore menu, but that seems only to allow me to restore huge swaths of data, site unseen. I would also like to be able to see the files on the drive on a different computer. What I would like to be able to delete large numbers of photos from my computer (as my native hard drive is about full) but can’t do so until I can confidently find them stored on the backup.
I really doubt if there is any value to manufacturers’ back-up software — it merely interposes another error prone layer between the file system amd the operating system.
I ditch the maker’s tools and just format with the desired file system ( I use BTRFS for storage only, but NTFS although elderly is useful if a Windows computer is attached ) and run Rsync through it’s gui Grsync to copy files and directories. Updating through grsync once the desired options — such as ignore existing files — are set to a permanent session, is as simple as pressing the run button.
Then the drive can be accessed through any file manager just as files on the original drive.
Note: Rsync will only copy, not delete the original files; but it’s the safest way to transfer files anyway.
You are aware that copying photos from your computer to an external drive, and then deleting them from your computer, is not a backup? If the external drive fails, the photos are gone.
With that said - the Seagate software most likely sucks. Pretty much any software bundled with a hardware product sucks - hard drive companies know how to make hard drives. They don’t know how to make software. So it is quite possible that you can’t look at individual “backed-up” files using the Seagate software.
What you need is referred to as “disk cloning” or “disk imaging” software. Here is one that is free for non-commercial use.
You will probably need to delete everything from the external drive and perform the backup again using the software above.
Additionally, if you do not care about “backing up” the whole drive, but just want to copy a bunch of songs and pictures files, by far the easiest way to do that is just manually copy/move the files over using Windows Explorer.
IIRC most auto backup type software that backs up entire drives or volumes moves data in sector but sector format for maximum transfer speed not file by file so individual files are not accessible unless the entire volume restored. There is probably backup software that will allow you to do this but it’s not the free bundled version.
If you are just moving certain data sets you can use windows explorer to copy directories which will do file by file copy to the new location but it can take a long time if you have lots of files.
I sense that some don’t understand the difference between “backup” and “copy”
Backups allow you to duplicate a large amount of data at once rather than doing one folder then going to another and duplicating that, then another.
Backups allow you to manage several sets of data instead of writing over previously duplicated data.
Backups compress many types of data to save space on the target disk. Consider the hours it would take to transfer folders individually, then add the time it would take to compress those files first.
Backups are not meant to create an image of the original disk. That’s what the COPY command is for.
hard drive companies know how to make hard drives. They don’t know how to make software
I’ve not used Seagate backup, but all of the Western Digital, Maxtor and Samsung disks that I’ve had purchased have sourced their software from other companies. I’ve been using Retrospect for several years and that was included with a Western Digital disk.
If you just need to preserve some pictures, optical disc (CDs and DVDs) are more suited to the task. They allow you to load and view the data as though it were a hard drive. At the size and resolution that most people use, CDs hold a huge amount of photos. Just make sure that you don’t “finalize” the disc. That will allow you to add more data later on.
Nero Back-It-Up is user friendly. If you buy a suite you’ll also get other useful utilities to create CDs and DVDs, get system data and a bunch of other stuff. To my mind, Nero has become bloated and I stopped at version 8 (I think it’s up to 10 now). But the backup utility is available separately.
There are many freeware backup utilities out there. I use one called Backup to DVD-CD. It’s helpful to me because you still have a valid backup if you interrupt it. I sometimes start an optical disc backup and run out of discs or want to quit and go do something else.
Alright dude here is what you do. You don’t need software or any bullshit to get this simple task done! Its a simple copy paste job. These people are making this shit way too complicated…
1.) plug in new hard drive
2.) Start button --> right click “computer” --> MANAGE
3.) format it to NTFS (a quick format)
4.) Now select all of your photos --> copy
5.) Make a folder on your new drive and paste that shit…
Your new hard drive is no different than a big-ass usb that can be connected via pcibus if need be, but yours probably has a big easy usb attachment thing.
For quick and dirty backups google linux and the “dd” command…
Yes, what I want to do is use it as a huge storage site. What I want to put there are things that are already backed up elsewhere, what is on the computer is kept “just in case” and I am willing to risk the failure of this new external hard drive. So I can just copy to the e drive (what this is designated as)?
Yes. But simple Copy/Paste will take a long time:
Many files at a time overloads the system making the transfer crawl; sometimes you get null files where it seems the file is there but has only 0KiB; if it stalls because of a file error ( even a filename Windows can’t comprehend ) then the whole transfer may stop and vanish, leaving one unsure what has or has not been transfered —hunting down file errors is boring. Finally you can end up with files lost from both drives.
DD or XCopy will do the job better than C/P; but with Grsync or similar tools you can update any changes without having to run the whole transfer once more and without possibility of loss ( I should say that it only copies directories, not single files, but the directory could be a whole drive ).
It’s only recently that Windows copied KDE, Apple and Gnome etc. in having status graphs for copying ( let alone being able to pause operations ).
You may have created an image file which is good if your current hard drive dies and you need to rebuild with a new hard drive quickly. If you want to see individual files later, see if there is a File-By-File option.
I use Ease ToDo backup software myself. I have two external hard drives for backing up. One I keep at work just in case my home burns down or thieves steal everything.
At work, I back up my databases 4 different ways including sending data to a server located 450 miles away every 30 minutes (Oracle Data Guard if you want to know).