Samsung External Hard Drive

[Simon]

I've just bought a Samsung 1Tb external drive for backup purposes, but Windows is reporting that it only has 931.50Gb of free space.  Is this normal for a brand new drive?  Where is the nearly 70Gb which seems to be missing?

[Glenn]

1Tb is the unformatted size, most companies also use 1000mb as a 1Tb rather than 1024Mb as it should be.

[Simon]

So, are you saying I should format it before using it?

[Steve]

The creation of a file structure occupies space ie the blank unformatted HDD is 1TB , the size of 935 Gb looks to be the usual and normal  available capacity from a Google.

[Simon]

OK, thanks. 

[zappaDPJ]

All four of my 1TB drives report exactly the same. Looking on the bright side it means you haven't lost anything to duff sectors

[Simon]

No, but 70Gb is quite a lot to 'lose'.  I'm surprised they can get away with it under trading standards.  If you bought a car with an advertised 2.0L engine, and it only turned out to have 1600cc, you'd soon complain!

[zappaDPJ]

Well you do actually have 1TB if you count it in decimal. It's true that some of it is sometimes lost to bad sectors and some of it is lost to the filling system but the majority of what appears to be lost isn't lost at all. It's just counted by the filing system in powers of 2 and not 10. The filing system sees a kilobyte as 1024 bits and not 1000.

[Steve]

Bedtime reading  http://www.howtogeek.com/123268/

So the maths is 1,000,000,000,000 / (1024x1024x1024) =  Gb

According to that though you've  got a little bit extra!

[Steve]

No, but 70Gb is quite a lot to 'lose'.  I'm surprised they can get away with it under trading standards.  If you bought a car with an advertised 2.0L engine, and it only turned out to have 1600cc, you'd soon complain!

The Honda Jazz 1.4 is nearer 1.3, 1339 I believe, the AMG Merc 63 used to be 6.3L it's now either 5.5 or 6.2 but who cares at that size when you've got 450bhp and beyond.

[Gary]

My Lacie external drive reads more than 931Gb when formatted it reads 999.86 GB.  Unless Macs reads drives differently. I would also format it Simon, alot of the time they come with software you don't need.

[Steve]

Macs do read the drive differently I read the explanation last night but can't find it at present.

[Simon]

I did format it, and it still said the same.

[Steve]

It will be the same as the HDD is fine. Windows has always used powers of 1024 to define a HDD capacity and the manufacturers work in 1000 so it will always appear as less , if you connect the drive to OS X it will show as 1TB or near as damn it as Apple use the manufacturers definition for HDD size.

[Simon]

It's purely for backups so should be OK.  I may actually get another one, just for additional storage.

[Technical Ben]

No, but 70Gb is quite a lot to 'lose'.  I'm surprised they can get away with it under trading standards.  If you bought a car with an advertised 2.0L engine, and it only turned out to have 1600cc, you'd soon complain!

There is 1TB worth of space on the "pages" of the drive. Some of that space is on the edges of the page you cannot write on, or in this case the sector markers. Some of that space is "contents" and page numbers/headers/footers. But you get a whole 1TB worth of drive, just it's less "usable" space. As long as they are consistent, it's ok. But I too prefer them to advertise usable space, as it gets very important on SSDs which can vary due to wear and other factors. :/

PS, it's not Windows that uses powers of 2, but computing. As it's binary, it should be powers of two. But competitors/companies/horrid advertisers realized they could claw back some sales/stats etc if they used thousands instead of 1024s. That's before we get to capitalization and bits and bytes and the muddle between them by most of us non-pros.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte

PPS, found it. The "thought police" are telling us X is Y, up is down, good is bad, unlimited is limited, and now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1541-2002
1028 IS 1000...     

So not wanting to mislead consumers, the honest companies now have to use 1Ti (tebi). But of cause, would you buy a 1TB drive or a 1Ti drive?

[Simon]

Thanks for the info, guys. 

I now have another question - this drive is for backup purposes, partly but not specifically to safeguard against the likes of CryptoLocker and other such damaging malware.  I'm well protected so not living in fear of anything, but if by chance something like that did get through, could it also infect a connected backup drive, thus rendering the backup useless? 

So, I guess the question is, is a backup drive safe to be left connected (preferable) or should it only be connected when being used?

[Steve]

I can't recall what you can and cannot do with Windows plus it's probably motherboard dependent, in OS X I have on one machine a 'good' bootable clone which is kept unconnected and then a regular backup HDD permanently attached.

[Gary]

since windows I think can be made to make auto backups just leave it connected, and make sure your av is set to scan it. If you connect it via USB 2 it will be slower, if its an older PC use eSATA/ firewire 800 (if they still make firewire 800 drives) Also worth cehcking the drive has the latest firmware, Lacie for instance do a program that checks and updates the drives firmware.

[Simon]

Yes, Windows 7 can do auto backups, that's why if prefer to keep it connected.  I was just wondering if a virus, should it penetrate the AV, could automatically spread to all connected drives.  So, in the case of something like CryptoLocker, could it 'lock' all files on all connected drives?  This is all hypothetical, I hasten to add.  It just crossed my mind when backing up this morning. 

[zappaDPJ]

Windows 7 backup will definitely backup a virus and it may well then produce an error the next time it attempts a backup. It's a bit of a double fail. It won't backup because there's a virus present in the archive which it put there in the first place? It has happened to me two or three times and the error is fairly well documented.

[Gary]

Get another drive and have a clone of a clean image just in case

[Steve]

Get another drive and have a clone of a clean image just in case

That's my feeling although I just don't if you can boot windows from a cloned USB drive like you can a Mac.

[Simon]

Well, you could go on forever getting more and more drives to have a clone of a clone of a clone... etc, but still what's stopping a virus transferring to the second or third clone?  Presumably you would only find out once it's happened, which I assume is what happened to Zap. 

[Simon]

I misread Gary's comment about a clone of a clean drive.  Yes, I suppose that would work, and leave it disconnected other than when renewing it.  That's kind of what I had in mind by having one drive just for backups, but obviously, I'd want to keep it updated. 

[zappaDPJ]

I would never rely on a single backup or multiple backups to a single device. If you follow that advice in some form and run an up-to-date anti-virus product you should generally be ok. For example my main PC gets backed up twice a week to a dedicated internal hard drive and once a week to an external device which holds two month's worth of backups. I also backup important data to USB drives as and when necessary.

[Technical Ben]

The backup is hopefully from before the virus was caught Simon. I did similar and mirrored back about 3 weeks when I got a Java exploit virus/worm/trojan a few years back.

It was on the same system, but the backup archive was a different file structure, so it did not migrate. Using Paragon (free) backup now, and the archive is compressed as well, so it adds a bit more security in a local drive. But that's only for convenience and to avoid a fresh windows install. Important files are backed up externally. I do it manually at the moment. But really should do a proper external back up one of these days.

[colirv]

I've installed CryptoPrevent to deal specifically with CryptoLocker. It seems to sit, as advertised, quite happily alongside my antivirus.

As regards backups, I've been using Livedrive for a year now - prepaid at £30 p.a.. It seems to work fine. However, it might well back up CrytoLocked files, and I don't include the few files I want to keep very secure. So I've recently adopted a second approach as additional security, which is a USB drive (in my case Toshiba rather than Samsung) which will only get switched on for the few hours it'll take to do an image of the whole PC - either monthly or perhaps weekly. This will mean I'll have cloud backup for precious photos and family films in case the house burns down, and a secure in-house backup in case my machine gets badly infected.

I've just tried out Paragon's free backup, and on the second occasion it crashed. I then belatedly looked up some reviews of it, and the same thing happened to the first reviewer. Accordingly it's been uninstalled. I'm about to try AOMEI backupper. My criteria were that it should be free, have the capability of creating a boot disk and do incremental or differential backups. Paragon would have ticked those boxes. I'll see if AOMEI does.

[colirv]

I should add that Livedrive, which checks for altered files hourly, involves a lot of uploading, which is a) why it's nice to be with IDNet and b) it's even nicer when you've just upgraded your FTTC and can upload at a measured 18.7Mbs!

[Simon]

I've been recommended this:  http://www.ax64.com/. Any thoughts?

[colirv]

£25 for a single machine is at the cheaper end of the paid-for market, but I'd need to be convinced that "backing up your drive, or restoring it to an earlier point in time, normally takes seconds to a minute"!

[Simon]

I guess it's only worthwhile if it's an improvement over the built in Windows backup utility.

[Gary]

I misread Gary's comment about a clone of a clean drive.  Yes, I suppose that would work, and leave it disconnected other than when renewing it.  That's kind of what I had in mind by having one drive just for backups, but obviously, I'd want to keep it updated. 

[Steve]

Most backup programs surprisingly will back up but it's the ability to restore from the backup to a clean HDD that's important otherwise it's worthless IMO , one can be mistakenly reassured by your ability to back up you HDD every hour automatically etc but it's no bloody good after format C:\ if you can't boot the machine and get data back. How many people actually test this ability I wonder, it's an exercise I recommend to anyone!

[Technical Ben]

It can take seconds if it does not over write, but instead uses new file at modification point. At which point a restore is just a change on the date of the machine (effectively).
If I ever get really into it, I'll have a "ghosted" drive, so I can just plug it in and be away in seconds.

[Simon]

Most backup programs surprisingly will back up but it's the ability to restore from the backup to a clean HDD that's important otherwise it's worthless IMO , one can be mistakenly reassured by your ability to back up you HDD every hour automatically etc but it's no bloody good after format C:\ if you can't boot the machine and get data back. How many people actually test this ability I wonder, it's an exercise I recommend to anyone!

But not one one usually undertakes until they need to!

[zappaDPJ]

Most backup programs surprisingly will back up but it's the ability to restore from the backup to a clean HDD that's important otherwise it's worthless IMO , one can be mistakenly reassured by your ability to back up you HDD every hour automatically etc but it's no bloody good after format C:\ if you can't boot the machine and get data back. How many people actually test this ability I wonder, it's an exercise I recommend to anyone!

I've tested the ability enough times to know that the chances of success are slim at best which is one reason why I keep a separate data archive. Windows repair does sometimes work but I've seem it fail more often, usually because it thinks the saved data is incompatible with the restore/repair version. I don't recall ever seeing any stand alone application work on Windows.

[Simon]

It can take seconds if it does not over write, but instead uses new file at modification point. At which point a restore is just a change on the date of the machine (effectively).

That AX64 thing claims it takes full backups of all data, but it doesn't specifically mention a system image.  I'm guessing it does, though, otherwise it wouldn't be able to restore 'back in time', would it?

[Steve]

It sounds very much like the Apple Time machine with which you can do complete or partial restores to a past time of your choosing. I recently upgraded by music server to Mavericks and my DAC didn't work, 15 mins later I'd gone back 12 hours to the previous version and in my case it's been a flawless complete restore.

[Gary]

It sounds very much like the Apple Time machine with which you can do complete or partial restores to a past time of your choosing. I recently upgraded by music server to Mavericks and my DAC didn't work, 15 mins later I'd gone back 12 hours to the previous version and in my case it's been a flawless complete restore.

Time machine works well, Steve. Its nice being able to go back toa  working environment that easily. I stuck with Mavericks and have been trouble shooting, Apple called me up and took a image of my machines state at that moment to see what was going wrong, which has to be worth it.

[Technical Ben]

Apple assistant... "Ah, that's the problem, 2,000 tabs open on the forum IDNetters...."