Hi, I bought the My Book Essential 1TB. I would really like to use it as a place to store my picture files, essentially. I have done a back up of my whole computer. Now can I go erase the original files on my laptop and yet they will still be stored on My Book? I would like to keep them on My Book and not on my laptop. Hope that makes sense. Thanks for any help!
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yes i also have the same problem, maybe you could send me your number/email address and we can discuss.
greengirl wrote:
Hi, I bought the My Book Essential 1TB. I would really like to use it as a place to store my picture files, essentially. I have done a back up of my whole computer. Now can I go erase the original files on my laptop and yet they will still be stored on My Book? I would like to keep them on My Book and not on my laptop. Hope that makes sense. Thanks for any help!
You should always keep 2 backups, minimumly (I keep 3), of your data. If you want to clear up room on your laptop, then you should find a way to make another copy of your data on another media source - whether external hard drive or DVD, etc. Otherwise, you haven’t backed up anything. You’ve only moved your data to another location.
So in other words, I didn’t buy the right type of product? An external hard drive is exactly what I was hoping for. This is not it?
I’m sorry to sound naive but that’s what I thought My Book was.
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The way I see it, I thought that backups worked the way you do on these WD External Hardrives, personally, I don’t really use them for backups, I use them for transferring Data/Using Data on other computers. I use a My Passport and most of what I do is either install a game/other thing on the hard drive, or just copy the files on there, rather than “backing them up”. This way I can see/use them on different computers, however, if I had a backup I would have use the retrieve command and that’s a pain. If you’re planning to view them FROM your My Book, rather than your Hard drive, just do a normal copy-paste on the hard drive, of course you should keep a backup, but it seems you’ve already backed it up, so you could I suppose just do that now. Then you can view them from your My Book, and delete them from you’re computer. If something goes wrong, back it up.
In short, I would just copy the files, go into the My Book hard drive from normal My computer browser, and paste it there. For example: If my files were in My pictures in My Documents, I would go to that folder, copy them via right clicking and selecting copy, go to My Computer from the Start menu, then go to your My Book drive (I use My passport, so for me I would see at the bottom of the icons, My Passport (H: ), then double click it to open) and right click on an empty space, and click paste. Then you can delete them from your laptop and view them on your My Book.
I hope this helps you and make sure to copy another backup to your desktop or something, in case anything horribly goes wrong.
BananaSlurpee wrote:
I hope this helps you and make sure to copy another backup to your desktop or something, in case anything horribly goes wrong.
That’s the point of a backup. In case something goes wrong. Data is never considered backed up until it’s in multiple locations on multiple media - whether computers, external drives, or DVD’s. To put data on an external drive, and then erase it from your computer, means you still only have it in one location. Drop the external drive, and now you have it no locations. I’m just trying to help you to not do something regrettable.
