HELP!

[Hoskins]

You might all want to take a look at this beauty. I'm on a Mac AND also a PC netbook AND a PC tower, and this lovely works with them all. In fact, I use it for me Time Machine backup mostly. For whatever reason, which started before my iMac, I have a history of burning out hard drives, whether they be internal or external. The last about 3 months, then pfizz and they're dead, with little curlicues of smoke often signalling the finality of it all. Only once was I able to recover the information with forensic help, and then only because they did it for me for free, not the $3k they originally requested.

Side story: I had sent it in for determination of the cost, they told me, I said I'd think about it, I paid the estimate fee, decided to have them return it to me, and they LOST IT. They found it 2 years later, and as an apology they recovered almost all my data at no cost.

Anyway, the point here is that you can pop any old or new HD into this unit and I haven't lost one to heat-stroke since.

I have one of those, I use it to recover customer files AND it is GREAT for keeping multiple hard drives in sync. I have two hard drives I use for backup. I work at home a lot but have an office in another town. One drive is with me in my truck, the other one is at my other office. I swap them once a week. I back up to the thermaltake, take that backup to the office, bring the other one back from the office, and back it up too. Two backups, same data.

And, for duplicate files, I like this: http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,...escription.html

Also, if you use the dropbox application, and not just the website, you are synchronizing your files to the machines that have dropbox installed. I have it on three different machines, meaning my dropbox data exists in 4 locations (and if you uninstall the dropbox application, the local dropbox folder isn't deleted, it just stops synchronizing to the cloud).