View Full Version : External disk - how does it work
patidee
Jan 16, 2011, 07:00 AM
I just copies all my files/photo's to a CLICKFREE external drive... what happens when I update or add to the originals or even delete them from my computer, which is really what I'd like to do to free up some badly needed space? I'm worried that I will end up messing up what I already stored. Please explain how it works. Thanks.
jeje409
Jan 16, 2011, 07:09 AM
One should really be computer literate when doing something like this.As long as you know how to copy and paste things I don't seeing you messing it up.Just make sure that the external have enough space to hold everything you want to put on there.I have one but mine is inside my computer,and when I download things from the internet... I save them directly to the other hard drive.Always make sure you COPY what you want to transfer in case it all didn't save.Once you have everything you want on your external and sure of it you can delete them on the computer.Hope this helps!
ScottGem
Jan 16, 2011, 07:18 AM
Clickfree drives are for automatic backups. About Clickfree Automatic Backup (http://www.clickfree.com/about.php)
Basically, as you add or change files, the files are backed up to the clickfree drive. If you lose a file, you can restore from the drive.
I don't believe clickfree drives are fully accessible external storage like other drives. But I'm not 100% sure of that.
eylusion
Jan 16, 2011, 08:08 AM
It appears that clickfree does not make duplicate files, so if you have say a text document on your computer and you back it up to your clickfree drive, it then exists in both places. If you update that text document on your computer and do another backup, the old text document on the clickfree drive will be erased and replaced with the "newer" modified text document. They probably do this so as to not fill up the drives contents with many "versions" or duplicates of individual files. Also you mentioned what would happen if you deleted files off your computer, it also appears that the clickfree drive will continue to maintain those backups that it previously made and not remove any files from the external drive, that would only occur in a synchronization scenario. If you want to learn more about "backups" in general. You can Google things like "archive bits", file creation and modified dates, and also reading about the differences between full, differential, incremental, etc backups at say a place like here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_backup.