Why you should consider 2 external hard drives

Last week I suggested using two external hard drives when offloading a significant collection of music and photo files from your hard drive. Apparently my suggestion confused many Good Booters.

The key word is “offloaded”.

As the popularity of digital photography and music has grown, so too has the megabytes/gigabytes of disk space required to store photo and music collections. To conserve hard drive space many users choose to simply archive (offload) their photos and music to an external hard drive. Others use their hard drive to edit and organize their photos and music and when completed, offload their productions to an external hard drive.

However in both cases offloading irreplaceable photos and music to a single external hard drive puts them in same harms way as not backing up irreplaceable files on a hard drive.

Having only one copy of your offloaded files on an external hard drive is the reason I suggested duplicating those files on a second external hard drive.

For those who use Second Copy, all you have to do after relocating your offloaded data to one external hard drive is to create a Profile to make an exact copy of that external hard drive to a second hard drive.

And think about this. If both your external hard drives also include a normal backup of your hard drive’s irreplaceable data, when the hurricane season arrives and a storm is eminent you can expeditiously deposit one of your external hard drives into your safe deposit box.

Having twin external hard drives may seem to be overkill. But I ask you. How many of your photos are not irreplaceable?

My recommended “free” software program this week is DeskPins (Google Deskpins).

You can maneuver XP application windows and shake, rattle and roll Windows 7 application windows so you can add data to one and continue to view another. But I suggest you investigate DeskPins (Google it)

When installed you simply click on the DeskPins icon in your Toolbar notification area and click on any window. A little colored stickpin will appear on the widow’s title bar and until you click on it to un pin it, the window will “always be on top”.

One the ways I use DeskPins is to pin a window and reduce its size. I can then move it freely over other application Window panes and/or Web sites adding information to it without constantly having to bring it to the forefront.

Note: It works fine on my Vista and Windows 7 computers.

Here’s wishing you a Good Boot.