Rescue and Recovery Confusion

[GregM]

Friends,

This is my first time posting here, although I feel like I am not new at all. I heavily relied on the advice of this forum when deciding on my new laptop, and when making the purchase. So far I am loving my ThinkPad T42, the best PC experience I have had bar none! So, Hello and Thank You!

My question is this: I am trying to figure out the Thinkvantage Rescue and Recovery software, and it isn't being cooperative. I installed an external hard drive to back up onto. Well, after reading the manual I figured out how to add the USB Hard Drive as a backup destination (in Preferences). However, it appears to me now, that each time I do a backup, the backup goes to BOTH my local volume (D drive) AND the external hard drive! I select USB in backup locations (two available in the drop down), but it still goes to my D drive as well, which is where I have my original, main backup! The question is: I don't want all my data backed up locally, only to the USB, because it takes up too much space. All I want locally is the emergency original backup, not anything else. Is there a way to have all new backups go ONLY to the USB hard drive? Am I wasting my time with Rescue and Recovery, and should I just go with the XP Backup?

All of your help is greatly appreciated.

Greg

[GomJabbar]

I tried a Rescue and Recovery backup to DVD's, and I don't believe it made any back ups on the local hard drive. That said, I didn't like Rescue and Recovery all that much. It takes a very long time to backup to DVD's and doesn't do a verify. Stomp Backup MyPC was over twice as fast, with a verify included. If you are interested in backup software, I recommend Stomp Backup MyPC. I have been using it for several years.

Many others here clone their main hard drive to an external drive, and Acronis True Image seems to be the favorite. So far I haven't tried this method myself.

[dg]

RnR isn't very flexible, but having said that I still use it.

I make backups onto an external drive only. I think that the only way to stop it making a copy onto your hard drive as well is to delete all your backups and start again, setting it to back up onto the external drive only. If you make your first (base) backup onto both your hard drive and the external, it will continue to make all the subsequent backups to the same destinations.

To me, the worst thing about RnR is that one has to delete ALL the backups when the target drive/partition is full before one can make a new backup. I worry that one day something will go wrong during this process and bingo, everything is lost! Therefore, I make a copy of my backups before deleting them and starting on a new set, but I have not tried restoring from these copies, so I am not certaain that it would work.