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Will Mozy back up my external hard drive?
April 13th, 2009 - Posted by Caitlin
The following post in our Reader Question series is an actual user submitted question. To maintain the integrity of the original question, we do not edit or change reader questions in any way.
Q: Will Mozy, or any of the online backup offerings, allow me to back up my external drive along with my desktop drive? Thanks.
A: Yes, they will. Mozy can backup any drive that Windows recognizes as "fixed." Operating systems consider hard drives "fixed," regardless of whether they are internal or external. DVD/CD-ROMs, media cards and some thumb or flash drives are not considered "fixed," and cannot be backed up.
You can tell if your drive is "fixed" by doing the following: Click Start Menu, then click My Computer. "Fixed" drives appear under Hard Disk Drives, while unfixed drives appear under Devices with Removable Storage. If you do not see these sections, click View > Arrange Icons by > Show in Groups. If your external drive is not "fixed," first copy the data onto one of your "fixed" drives, then select the data for back up.
To learn more about Mozy or other online backup services, see our reviews and comparison chart.
8 Responses to “Will Mozy back up my external hard drive?”
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June 26th, 2009 at 7:54 am
I am using carbonite at this time, and the main drawback I see is that they don't recognize external hard drives. Mine are shown as "Fixed" drives. They are planning on offering it in the future. I haven't found any that say they can backup external hard drives.
August 24th, 2010 at 6:02 am
Mozy will back-up the external drive, but there is a BIG caveat — if the external drive is ever disconnected from the computer when Mozy runs a backup, Mozy DELETES from storage all of the files on the external hard drive.
So take this example: On Monday, you back-up your laptop, which has 10GB of data on the internal hard drive, and 20GB of data on the external hard drive. You then unplug the external drive and go on a business trip. While you are away, Mozy runs an automatic back-up. Because it cannot find the external hard drive, it assumes that you have deleted all of those files and marks the 20GB of files for deletion from Mozy's servers in 30 days. When you come home on Friday and re-attach the hard drive, Mozy will "un-mark" the 20GB of files that previously were marked for deletion.
This is all fine and dandy until the following happens: You leave for a 6 month assignment in another city and leave your external drive at home. Mozy runs a back-up while you are away with the external drive disconnected and, because it cannot find the external drive, marks those 20GB of data for deletion. While you are away, a tree falls on your house and destroys your external drive. When you return 6 weeks later, the 20GB of data on your external drive are destroyed and Mozy has no back-up of the data because it deleted the data from its servers after 30 days.
January 21st, 2011 at 8:44 am
I've been searching for something that will let me back up ONLY my external hard drive. So far SpiderOak is all I've found. any other suggestions?
January 21st, 2011 at 10:15 am
Actually, you can do this with Mozy and with IDrive. Both allow you to back up mapped drives, so you just need to be sure to deselect your computer's hard drive if you don't want that backed up. This can be done easily in the setup process.
January 24th, 2011 at 9:48 pm
How do you do that Kent?
February 2nd, 2011 at 3:57 pm
BackBlaze will allow you to back up your external, no problem. I do mine this way. I have ALL of my data on external drives only.
January 2nd, 2012 at 11:09 am
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