Disconnecting External Hard Drive

I see a lot of recommendations to disconnect an external hard drive after making a backup. If the external drive is used only for backups and isn't labled as C drive or even D is it still in some kind of danger of being corrupted by malware or is there some other reason?

I'm asking this because I have my backups scheduled with a weekly full back up and daily incrementals and I'm really happy with the set up. If I disconnect it every day I may forget or even more likely get lazy and not reconnect it all the time.

Any advice or information is greatly appreciated.
Thanks

 

Yes, it is in some danger, but if you disconnect it there is the danger that you won't have a backup. It's a tough call, but I think I'd leave it connected.

In my experience, the most common reasons people need to restore a backup is a drive hardware failure, a virus or spyware/malware that they can't remove or an installation of new hardware or software that goes terribly wrong. None of these are likely to hurt your external drive. Although a virus could, most don't attack any drive other than the system drive. So, if your experience matches mine, you'd be better off with an up-to-date backup.

 

Why not disable it, right click my computer.properties.hardware.device manager.right click drive to disable.

also in the bios.

then enable drive when your off line or need to backup.

 

Hello all,
On the subject of external drive backups-

I have 2 laptops and suffered the consequences of no backup after one lost it's disk last month. Determined to learn from my costly neglegence, I purchased a 200 GB Sabrent External USB 2 hard drive and True Image 8 hoping to easily perform regular, full image backups on both machines.
Just finished installing True Image on the 1st laptop but after reading the manual, am unsure what to expect, or do next and thereafter. Before plugging the cable in to connect the new drive, I thought it might be a good idea to solicit feedback from more knowledgable people. Conceptually, does this sound like a good plan? Should the laptop or new external drives be partitioned? If so, how does one best determine the correct sizes?
Comments and recomendations appreciated.
------------------
Neal

 

You don't need to partition the drives on the notebooks or the external drive. Make folders on the external drive for the two notebooks so that it's easy to keep their backups separate.

You don't need to create a secure zone or activate the recovery manager. Just start True Image and double click Create Backup. Select the entire C drive of your notebook as the source. Select Full system backup and then select the appropriate folder on the external drive as the destination. Type in a name for the backup. Use normal compression, make a couple of notes about the condition of the system and why you made the backup and click Proceed to start the backup.

When the backup finishes, use the Check Image feature to confirm that you have a good backup. Do this for the first few backups and for any critically important backups.

If you want to be tidy about it, here are a couple of optional steps before doing a backup.

1. Run Scandisk, Check disk or Error Checking on the drive you are backing up. If any errors are found, correct them before continuing.

2. Run DiskCleanup to get rid of junk in the Recycle bin, temp files, etc. Do not use the Compress old files option. True Image will do a better job compressing them. If your system is running well and you want to minimize the size of the backup, click the More Options tab and in the System Restore box click Clean Up. This will delete all but the most recent restore point and can reduce by several hundred MB or more the size of the backup.

3. Defragment the drive you are backing up.

OK? Now, just go do it and come back here if you have any more questions.

 

I use an external drive for back up, but the problem is that the space it takes up, and the 2 extra leads, so I do an incremental back up every 2 weeks, and then disconnect the external drive until the next occasion. Am I wrong to do this?

 

No, what you are doing is fine, but I prefer making full backups on a regular basis. If any one incremental backup goes bad, you can't restore it or any incremental made after it.

So, I make full backups just to be sure I can restore up to that point. Of course, if you have a time problem or space limitations on the backup drive, incrementals are great. However, I'd make a new full backup after every two, three or four incrementals just to be super safe.