Hello,
I am after buying an external Hdd to backup my files on my pc. I have 2 250GB hdds which I have nearly filld, so I am looking for something which will back up that much. I was wondering what should I look for when buying one and what ones would you reccomend? And also, What type of backup would be best e.g. incremental etc.
I would be very greatfull for any help.
Thankyou.

p.s What Connection would be fastest as I can imagine it is going to take a long time?

I bought two backup external drives off of eBay. One is a slim drive, and the other is a regular drive in an enclosed case.

You'd want to do an incremental. Why waste time doing a complete copy?

USB is normally how these drives connect, but for that much data, nothing will be super fast.

Life's more painless for the brainless.

If you have almost 500GBs of files you must have lots of music or video files. I suggest you burn those files to DVD. Don't call something a backup if it will be the ONLY copy of the file. If you need to free up space by moving files to an external drive the will end up as the only copy.

Thankyou for your time and reply.
When backing up data is it compressed at all?
Which make would you go for?
also I was looking at this:
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/uk/e...

Are these any good at all?

If anyone knows anything about the "seagate freeagent pro" and whats so special about it I would also be very greatfull.

Again thank you for your time.

What kinds of files are involved. Depending on what software is used when performing a backup files may be compressed. Compression rates vary with the size and type of file. That unit looks like a standard External USB drive to me, nothing special.
Backing up means creating some kind of image that can be used to restore your primary drive/s if necessary. As I stated above, you can't possibly have anywhere near that amount of programs on your system. Files don't need to be part of an image because they can be accessed from anywhere. Windows and programs that run under Windows should be imaged so that you don't need to re-install piecemeal if rebuilding becomes necessary. What you need to do is to create copies of the kinds of files that are normally stored in My Documents. If you need to free up some space on your internal drives, by all means move some files to an external drive. You may not want those files to be part of an image as they can't be readily accessed. Move them and also burn them. External drives break even more frequently than internal ones.
I submit that if you have, say 450GB of files, taht you don't even know WHAT you have. Get a sleeve of DVDRs and start burning. As you burn make folders with some sort of order to them and move the files to the new appropriate folder as you burn them. You may find alot of stuff that is duplicates or plain junk. After you are have processed say 50 or 75GBs of files then move the folders to the new External drive you bought.
As far as a backup image of your operating system goes even using an incremental backup method requires that you restore all the files at some point, should your harddrive quit or a virus destroys things. You should consider partitioning at least on of those 250s and installing Windows and your programs ONLY on that partition. In that way you will have an image of managable size. Say 1o to 15GBs. Then use Ghost or a similar program to create an image of that partition. Not need to create an image of 500GBs. That would take an awful long time to create and to restore.