Travel Technology - Is it possible to backup my backup? WD 250GB USB?

I have almost 200GB on my WD Passport. I would like to backup my backup. So I think I will buy another Passport. If I plug them both into the same PC (XP), I assume they will each get their own drive and I can copy one to the other? Any gotchas with this plan? What is a good copy command to preserve the directory hierarchy?

BTW, my PC has nowhere near that much space available.

P.S., Buy.com has a good sale on these now. $86.99 including shipping!

Your plan will work as you expect. You don't really need a command. Use the Windows Explorer and highlight all the folder(s) on the source drive and click Edit ->Copy. Then Click on the destination drive and click Edit -> Paste. 200GB will take a while.

Your plan will work as you expect. You don't really need a command. Use the Windows Explorer and highlight all the folder(s) on the source drive and click Edit ->Copy. Then Click on the destination drive and click Edit -> Paste. 200GB will take a while.

I would think that by doing that, you might miss some of the hidden / system files.

I would think that by doing that, you might miss some of the hidden / system files.

Unless you've installed something to the USB drive that creates hidden data or you've purposely hidden data (and your Windows settings have the "don't show hidden files and folders" option selected), there should be no hidden files.

Similarly, unless you've purposely relocated system files, this isn't an issue. Besides, the intent is probably not to back up system data but user data.

I have almost 200GB on my WD Passport. I would like to backup my backup. So I think I will buy another Passport. If I plug them both into the same PC (XP), I assume they will each get their own drive and I can copy one to the other? Any gotchas with this plan? What is a good copy command to preserve the directory hierarchy?

BTW, my PC has nowhere near that much space available.

P.S., Buy.com has a good sale on these now. $86.99 including shipping!

If the Passport is a true backup (hidden files, system files, etc), then you can plug both drives into a PC and either use your backup program to "clone" it, if the backup program supports that, or download and use G4U, which is a disk clone utility.

If the Passport just has "normal" data files on it, then you can just use Windows Explorer as another responder already described.

Bob

I would think that by doing that, you might miss some of the hidden / system files.

Your right, I did assume that the backup consisted of conventional data files. My preference is to backup data files to external devices (preferably located elsewhere) and to protect critical operating systems/high demand data storage with real time redundancy using RAID systems.

I guess I focus so much on data backup because I can always re-install an operating system, but I can restore valuable data only if I have a backup.

Just normal data files. Thanks for the confirmation.