Backup SoftWare in Portable Drives.

[MegalosSkylaki]

My Questions relate to the Western Digital Passport external portable hard drive and to the Maxtor One Touch Mini external hard drive, although I suppose it probably would apply to other makes as well.

The WD and Maxtor External portable drives have SW for backup and encryption already installed in them, which gets installed when you first use the device.

Question: Does the Hard drive have to stay attached (by USB or eSATA) in order to make incremental backups, or does the System Drive make an image of changes and additions in Files and saves this until you re-connect the external drive?

Now if not connected I understand the backup SW might "tag" ( I suspect) any added or changed Files for purposes of making an incremental Backup.

Question:Would this require that the backup SW be running "in background" all the time?

Can this be clarified for me before I install either one of these external drives with their backup software.

ThanX,

MegalosSkylaki

[GroundZero3]

Dooog, if you have the backups running at a certain time, you will need to have the hard drive connected all the time. Not sure how the software works, but some software is smart enough to turn its self on to do a backup and shut itself down after completion

[wizard_of_dns]

Be advised that a lot of these drives that offer so called "encryption" don't actually encrypt anything. I can't remember where I read about it, but it was in the way the encryption was used. If you want to deploy real encryption, Truecrypt is you anwser.