Need some advice please

[Craig321]

Hi,

Tomorrow my hard drive setup should arrive, the following will be in the box:

250GB x2 RAID 0 - OS, installs, programs. Nothing important.
500GB internal - storage
500GB external (IcyBox eSATA) - backup of storage & game backups etc.

My current storage & backup solution is a 250GB external.

It currently has 13GB left which is a bit of a problem.

I need to get over 50GB of important stuff from my current 500GB C drive backed up ready to be formatted so it can be the storage drive.

A easy, quick solution would to put the backups onto my new external... but what if the new external is faulty? I'd lose my data.

So my question: what's the best way to make sure a new drive isn't going to fail on you? (Obviously without copying 500GB of data to it, that'd just take ages )

EDIT

Just found a 38GB backup file on the external (an old selective backup of my C drive) so that's 38GB free, although I don't think that'll be enough, so the question still stands

Thanks,
Craig.

 

[rpstewart]

A easy, quick solution would to put the backups onto my new external... but what if the new external is faulty? I'd lose my data.

I take it you only have the one copy of this data then? That isn't a backup, it's just data.

I would suggest that if the new external works out of the box then the chance of it failing will be pretty much the same as your existing external so you might as well go ahead and use it.

 

[Craig321]

I take it you only have the one copy of this data then? That isn't a backup, it's just data.

I would suggest that if the new external works out of the box then the chance of it failing will be pretty much the same as your existing external so you might as well go ahead and use it.

Yep, when I said what you quoted above I meant backups as in the data that is going to be backed up

If that's the case then I'll copy a few GB to it (to make sure basic functions are working) and then I'll go ahead with it then

Thanks,
Craig,