Function as addl memory?

[CDSpen]

Yesterday my husband bought and installed Western Digital Media Center Hard Drive 160 gb, then told me about it. He knows nothing about computers. I know only a little more than him. Our computer was fine for us until my son gave me an ipod and downloaded Itunes and Mytunes and Mytunes Redux as well as about 5000 songs onto my computer. Now the memory is 91% full and we can't even do a defrag and the computer is slow. I also want to put the rest of my personal music on the computer. We would like the WD Media Center to function as seamless additional memory to our computer, but it seem like it wants to back up items from our C drive, with the option of restoring it when asked. Is this the only way for it to function? Do we have to backup to the Media Center, then delete the music from our regular C drive to free up space, then restore it every time we want to work with the music? If this is so, my music collection won't even fit on my C drive once I add the rest of the music to mytunes. Will this product work for us? I would be very grateful for any education on this issue. Thanks! Cheryl

[CDSpen]

Here's an update: Yesterday my son started the "Backup process". It took all night to back everything up to the new Media Center. My son (who knows more about computers than me) assured me this product was additional memory for us. While it was backing up I read everything on the Help menu. From my reading, I suspect the mega memory available on the Media Center is for multiple copies of back ups from multiple days and would only be accessessed in the event of a need to restore something. Now that its done, I checked defrag and now my computer hard drive is 100% full instead of 91% full -- because of this new software, I guess. It doesn't appear that the memory has "seamlessly joined my computer memory, like I had hoped.

 

Am I right in assuming that the only way to free up memory is to now delete stuff from my hard drive, knowing I can restore it from my new Media Center? If I delete the memory-stealing culprit -- the ipod music -- won't it take as long to put it back if I want to access it as it took to load it onto the media center (all night)? That doesn't sound like an improvement to me. Can somebody please enlighten me? Western Digital has no 800 number that I can find, and has not responded to my email.

[dld]

What version of Retrospect Express are you using?

[CDSpen]

Thanks for responding! I'm using V6.5.342. We bought it a few days ago.

[dld]

From what I understand, your internal hard drive is almost full. What is the size of this hard drive?

 

The reason I want to know is that your external HD of 160 GB is quite a large HD. You could probably partition it into two partitions and use one partition for Retrospect Express backups and the other partition simply for extra storage for music, etc.

 

The Retrospect Backup you created on the external drive is used to recover in case of disaster. Note that you must have a working version of Windows on your computer in order to restore your system. This means that should the disaster still allow you to access the Retrospect Backup on the external drive, then you can simply do a Retrospect Restore and you're in business. If however the disaster is such that the Retrospect Backup cannot be accessed (you can't boot to Windows for example), then you should have a bootable recovery disk that will enable you to reformat your HD, reinstall Windows and some drivers, reinstall SP2 if using WinXP and if SP2 is not part of the installed Windows, reinstall Retrospect Express, and finally be able to access your Retrospect Backup. You would then repair the Catalog and Retrospect Restore your system.

 

Dell normally provides you with a bootable Windows Reinstallation Disk. If you don't have such a bootable reinstallation disk, then I would suggest getting Acronis True Image. With ATI you can create such a bootable disk. This disk operates in a Linux environment, so is independent of Windows. ATI allows you to create an image of your operating system. In case of a major disaster, you insert the Linux boot disk, access your image and restore your system. It's that simple. Here is the link to the ATI forum.

 

http://www.wilderssecurity.com/forumdisplay.php?f=65

 

 

[CDSpen]

Hi dld! Thank-you so much for helping me. I have an Intel Celeron processor 1.00 GHz, 256 MB RAM and am operating Windows XP. I saw a pie chart of the memory on my Western Digital Media Center after my initial backup was put on it. From memory, it looked like the backup only took up between 5% to 10% of the 160 GB available... lots left, like you said.

 

Personally, I could care less about a backup. This is not a business, just my home computer with too much music. I just want more seamless storage on my current computer and if there is a way to get this new thing to function that way I'd be thrilled. Right now I can't even do a defrag because there is no room for it to spread out and organize the information. If the two memories could join and act as one I'd have no problem and plenty of room to store everything too.

 

I am trying very hard to understand what you just wrote, and I will persevere in trying to do the things you suggest, but I'm just a mom, flying by the seat of my pants with this. (How is it that the kids seem to understand so much? Ha-ha. But I spawned 'em, so maybe I too can learn.) If you still think this software will work and I should not just box it up and return it, I will try. It would be ok with me if I could just open itunes from my C drive, then tell it to populate the music library list with the music stored on my G drive (the new one.) That seems fine to me. But if you think I'll have to be constantly importing files from the new part to the old part to work with it, maybe bought the wrong thing. I did look at the importation process, and it seems hard to figure out how to find and identify the right file to bring back and a pain to wait hours for it. (It took all night for my music to be moved and that's the thing I'd have to be moving back and forth.) So will this site you referred me to help me with partitioning the storage? Thanks a million! Cheryl

[dld]

I think you should just forget about True Image if you're not interested in backing up your system. Also Retrospect Express may not be of much use to you. From what I understand now, all you want to do with your external HD is to extend the size of your internal HD. I'm afraid this cannot be done seamlessly as you wish. They are separate drives. You can transfer data to the external drive various ways: drag & drop, SendTo, etc. The Retrospect Backup that you created is not extending the memory of your internal HD. The only purpose of Retrospect Backup is to do a Retrospect Restore. Even a Retrospect Duplicate would not be of any use to you; it would not add extra storage to your internal HD.

 

So if you want to use the external USB2 HD strictly as a storage drive, then delete the Retrospect Backup you have created and drag & drop the files you want to store there, or use SendTo. If you want to keep the Retrospect Backup for what it's worth, then it might be a good idea to use WinXP to partition the external drive in two, use one partition for Retrospect Backups, and the other partition to store files in.