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General discussion

New External WD Hard Drive--Vista Issues

Jan 20, 2011 2:20AM PST

When I have my Vista system plugged in to a "WD My passport Essential SE" external drive and I have it set up for automatic backups from the default set in Norton 360, it appears everything is moving there. I was wondering, when you are browsing the internet either w/ Vista's InPrivate Browsing or just regular browsing, does your browsing info or history or websites get automatically copied to the external drive. I looked at WD knowledge base and Norton's and I cant seem to find the answer to this question. Is it better to not do automatic updates and just use a weekly one? Any suggestions are appreciated.

Discussion is locked

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Interesting,
Jan 20, 2011 4:45AM PST

and to be honest, I don't know the answer.

I think there are bigger issues as well. For instance, say you are working on some important document or spreadsheet or similar, or editing your favorite home video, and save the changes to your hard disk, does that changed file get backed up at the same time? Or maybe you are saving the file for the first time. Does that get backed up?

My suspicion is that the answer is No. Any document/file etc you are working on is ignored by the backup routines. In the same light, I suspect that TIFs, (Temporary internet Files), are also ignored, because the browser is using them all the time. But I am not at all sure.

The issue for me would not be about TIFs or History, but about those personal documents. I would ensure that I copied them elsewhere.

In fact unless I was cloning a drive, I wouldn't bother with backup utilities at all. I would just ensure all my personal data was backed up, (more than one copy), and also I had a plan how to recover from a failed OS install if it ever happens, eg how to reinstall the OS. In fact, that is what I do do.

Mark

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The instruction manual ...
Jan 24, 2011 2:00AM PST

that came with your external drive tells you in detail how to set it up for backup and how to select the files/folders to be backed up.

Have you set it up? if you have it backs up what you told it to, and only what you told it to.