On demand backup drive.
 

I have to make my backing up more frequent.

Right now I use a double dock, with a 5 1/4" drive. I bought one whose
advertising said it turned off when it wasn't getting input, but
afterwards, when I tried to get the software the ad said was needed,
someone there admitted there was no software and it didnt' do it!!!**

Is there a 5 1/4" dock that will turn off when not in use.


I have the impression that those 2 1/2" backup drives do indeed turn off
when I'm not backing up. Do they? All of them? Any that you
recommend? Any you recommend against?



(I wanted the HDD image to be made to a 5 1/4 so if there were a
problem, I could just swap HDD's. That would work, right? But most of
my backups are just data files (not part of a disk image). and I can't
stand to have the drive spinning 24/7 when I only back up for 10 minutes
once a day or less. And I can't reach the switch without standing up and
going around the desk.)



WRT my email backups, if there is a crash (and I just had several) the
program rebuilds the table of contents but does a half-baked job, and if
I back that up, I no longer have a backup of a good toc. Some software
keeps more than one generation of backup. Any recommendations?


**This is the second time advertising lied to me. Back during dial-up
and call waiting, a modem claimed to let me know when someone was
calling me, but after I bought it, it didn't work either and someone on
the phone admitted it didn't work.

TIA

On demand backup drive.
 

On Mon, 22 Jun 2020 15:46:54 -0400, micky
wrote:

I have to make my backing up more frequent.

Right now I use a double dock, with a 5 1/4" drive. I bought one whose
advertising said it turned off when it wasn't getting input, but
afterwards, when I tried to get the software the ad said was needed,
someone there admitted there was no software and it didnt' do it!!!**

Is there a 5 1/4" dock that will turn off when not in use.

You probably mean a 3 1/2" drive, like a standard hard drive. CD/DVD drives
are typically 5 1/4" wide, but hard drives haven't been that big in a long
time.


I have the impression that those 2 1/2" backup drives do indeed turn off
when I'm not backing up. Do they? All of them? Any that you
recommend? Any you recommend against?



(I wanted the HDD image to be made to a 5 1/4 so if there were a
problem, I could just swap HDD's. That would work, right?

If you're making a clone, your destination drive can hold exactly one copy
of your source drive and you can boot from the clone if your source drive
is/was bootable. (With exceptions.) If you instead create images, then you
can place as many images on the destination drive as you have available
space, but you generally can't boot from an image. Instead, you'd have to
write one of the images to a hard drive and then boot from it.

snip

On demand backup drive.
 

In alt.comp.hardware, on Mon, 22 Jun 2020 15:13:46 -0500, Char Jackson
wrote:

On Mon, 22 Jun 2020 15:46:54 -0400, micky
wrote:

I have to make my backing up more frequent.

Right now I use a double dock, with a 5 1/4" drive. I bought one whose
advertising said it turned off when it wasn't getting input, but
afterwards, when I tried to get the software the ad said was needed,
someone there admitted there was no software and it didnt' do it!!!**

Is there a 5 1/4" dock that will turn off when not in use.

You probably mean a 3 1/2" drive, like a standard hard drive. CD/DVD drives
are typically 5 1/4" wide, but hard drives haven't been that big in a long
time.

You're right. I was never very good with numbers. (though I majored in
math in college.)


I have the impression that those 2 1/2" backup drives do indeed turn off
when I'm not backing up. Do they? All of them? Any that you
recommend? Any you recommend against?



(I wanted the HDD image to be made to a 5 1/4 so if there were a

Oops. I meant clone. I was never very good with words, either.

problem, I could just swap HDD's. That would work, right?

If you're making a clone, your destination drive can hold exactly one copy
of your source drive and you can boot from the clone if your source drive
is/was bootable. (With exceptions.) If you instead create images, then you
can place as many images on the destination drive as you have available
space, but you generally can't boot from an image. Instead, you'd have to
write one of the images to a hard drive and then boot from it.

Right. I once knew that. T

snip

On demand backup drive.
 

Corrected post

I have to make my backing up more frequent.

Right now I use a double dock, with a 3 1/2" drive. (I bought one whose
advertising said it turned off when it wasn't getting input, but
afterwards, when I tried to get the software the ad said was needed,
someone there admitted there was no software and it didnt' do it!!!**)


Is there a 3 1/2" dock that will turn off when not in use, when there is
no data coming from the PC.


I have the impression that those 2 1/4 backup drives do indeed turn off
when I'm not backing up. Do they? All of them? Any that you
recommend? Any you recommend against?

On demand backup drive.
 

micky wrote:
Corrected post

I have to make my backing up more frequent.

Right now I use a double dock, with a 3 1/2" drive. (I bought one whose
advertising said it turned off when it wasn't getting input, but
afterwards, when I tried to get the software the ad said was needed,
someone there admitted there was no software and it didnt' do it!!!**)


Is there a 3 1/2" dock that will turn off when not in use, when there is
no data coming from the PC.


I have the impression that those 2 1/4 backup drives do indeed turn off
when I'm not backing up. Do they? All of them? Any that you
recommend? Any you recommend against?

The policy of the drive is one thing.

You can have drives with aggressive spindown (but
not complete power off necessarily).

The problem is, when the computer first boots or is
alerted to the presence of the drive, you get a
drive letter and the partition is mounted.

The OS can "probe" a partition at regular intervals.
For a drive that has entered the spin-down state or
the parked state or whatever, this wakes them up.
Now, all day long, they're doing spin-up, spin-down,
spin-up, spin-down.

And if you had a fancy software that does:

* Dismount
* Offline

or similar, now when your backup software goes to run,
it finds the drive letter doesn't exist and the
backup fails. If the drive is left in an inappropriate
state, there is still trouble.

And you can see here, there really is no happy medium.
No matter what scheme they come up with, there is a
"minus" at some point.

https://superuser.com/questions/4109...hen-not-in-use

*******

For an SSD, it wouldn't really matter if it was
"left spinning". Idle power can be under a watt on
some of them. If they wake up and go to sleep again,
nobody cares.

An SSD might be suitable for "small" backups.

Or, break the bank for large backups, depending
on who makes it and how big it is. For example, a
recently advertised WDC SSD was $100 for 1TB storage.

An SSD with SATA interface, would plug into your dock.

Paul

On demand backup drive.
 

micky wrote:

Corrected post

I have to make my backing up more frequent.

Right now I use a double dock, with a 3 1/2" drive. (I bought one whose
advertising said it turned off when it wasn't getting input, but
afterwards, when I tried to get the software the ad said was needed,
someone there admitted there was no software and it didnt' do it!!!**)

Is there a 3 1/2" dock that will turn off when not in use, when there is
no data coming from the PC.

I have the impression that those 2 1/4 backup drives do indeed turn off
when I'm not backing up. Do they? All of them? Any that you
recommend? Any you recommend against?

Eventually, you get the size(s) right! :-) Theu are 2.5" drives.

I use Western Digital (WD) Elements (USB) portable drives, 1TB.

These drives do 'turn off' - I assume you mean stop spinning -, BUT
when connected, Windows will often - shortly - access all connected
drives, so they spin up again. That happens for example when you go to
'This PC' in (Windows) File Explorer, because that screen shows all
connected drives, so File Explorer will re-check those. So they're
*mostly* spinned down, but not all the time.

I also have a NAS - Synology DS115j DiskStation - which *does* not
(re-)spin up when I do not use it -, but as it's a NAS, it's connected
via the network and hence not suitable for your imaging/cloning use. It
is of course suitable for file-level backup, which is the way I use it.

As to imaging (I don't (yet) clone), I use the WD Elements drives and
connect them before the image backup and disconnect them afterwards.

On demand backup drive.
 

On 6/22/2020 3:46 PM, micky wrote:
I have to make my backing up more frequent.

Right now I use a double dock, with a 5 1/4" drive. I bought one whose
advertising said it turned off when it wasn't getting input, but
afterwards, when I tried to get the software the ad said was needed,
someone there admitted there was no software and it didnt' do it!!!**

Is there a 5 1/4" dock that will turn off when not in use.


I have the impression that those 2 1/2" backup drives do indeed turn off
when I'm not backing up. Do they? All of them? Any that you
recommend? Any you recommend against?



(I wanted the HDD image to be made to a 5 1/4 so if there were a
problem, I could just swap HDD's. That would work, right? But most of
my backups are just data files (not part of a disk image). and I can't
stand to have the drive spinning 24/7 when I only back up for 10 minutes
once a day or less. And I can't reach the switch without standing up and
going around the desk.)



WRT my email backups, if there is a crash (and I just had several) the
program rebuilds the table of contents but does a half-baked job, and if
I back that up, I no longer have a backup of a good toc. Some software
keeps more than one generation of backup. Any recommendations?


**This is the second time advertising lied to me. Back during dial-up
and call waiting, a modem claimed to let me know when someone was
calling me, but after I bought it, it didn't work either and someone on
the phone admitted it didn't work.

TIA

Given that good practice would call for keeping the backup in a safe
location -- a media safe for example -- what is the importance of this
shutdown ability? There are certainly any number of USB3 docks around that
have a power switch and, if the drive in the dock is to be used for backup
only, clicking 'safe removal' and then flipping the power switch on the
dock after the backup shouldn't be that onerous.

--
Bodger's Dictum: Artifical intelligence
can never overcome natural stupidity.