I bought the My Book Live a couple of weeks ago without knowing they had the Dou version. I don’t want to depend on one drive to have all my music and photos and I’d like to back it up some how. What is the most comon way of duing this? what options you guys recommend?
see my comments on:
http://community.wdc.com/t5/My-Book-Live/Data-recover-on-a-My-Book-Live-2TB-HELP/td-p/430120/page/2
Nevertheless, what I do and works for me…
- Files on Laptop/desktop: From there I have multiple copies to the MBL and on another USB hard drive.
Total: 3 copies with the main files being on laptops/desktops
I have two MyBookLives. I started to use the safepoint function that seemed perfect for this. However, if you browse the forum here, you will see that both PC and Mac users run into problems because the safepoint function doesn’t backup files of some kind and then just breaks. You can just move those files out of your backup hierarchy, however, this is only possible manually, since you cannot guess which files will come through and which won’t. If you can use Linux, you can log on to your MBL and simply set up a backup script that uses rsync to backup your MBL to another MBL or to any other USB media that is reachable in your network (see here).
I just copy the files to a 2T usb3 hard drive on the computer with a usb3 connection; more specifically, I do an “update” copy from the MBL when I change something, preferrably not past 1 week…
My desktop is win7 & robocopy is an undocumented mass utility; read that it was also in vista but haven’t read anything about it being on xp but is also on win8. Robocopy is a command line executable BUT someone has since provided a free gui with parameter setting like the gui Richcopy which I’ve been using until now; the “Easy Robocopy” gui front end for Robocopy has the same input settings as Richcopy. Both Richcopy & Robocopy has settable threads for working with Richcopy defaulting to 3 while Easy_Robocopy required one to set the number if one wanted more than 1 thread.
The utility is quite nice as it can do incremental copy/replacing depending on what the spec for the changes are; the default is date-time being newer on source device or not on the destination device; there are other variations also. One just need to remember that everything is scanned & compared so that it can be “slow” if all the files are under 1 directory instead of being split up so that just updating each directory will seem to be quicker than 1 directory.
As I have had to do MBL replacements twice, the utilities came in very handy as it was just copying files; no special formats to unravel & this assumes no deletions necessary & is not a true backup at various stages since I don’t intend to delete any of my ripped CDs.
