[CornishCrumpet]

Hey there,

Firstly apologies if I have not posted this in the correct forum! I have an Asus X51RL notebook, almost 2 years old (but still under warranty). The mousepad doesn't register in the taskbar anymore and doesn't work, and some of the letters on the keyboard don't work either. I called Asus support and they said I need to do a full system recovery but I need to back up everything first as apparently when I do the recovery it wipes my hard drive. I have about 46gb of music I need to back up, can anyone tell me the best way to do this? I thought about transfering it onto DVD's as data (not sure how to do this though!!) as I went to a computer shop and they said I should buy an external hardrive instead but that costs £100!! I don't really want to spend that much.

Any help and advice would be much appreciated, thank you

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Using a file compressor/archiver such as Winrar you can compress the music files into 'parts'.

E.g. music.r01, music.r02, music.r03

You can specify the size of each part in the program usually - maybe set it to a bit under 4.7GB so that each part can fit on one DVD. Doing this would probably require 10 4.7GB DVDs, which is much cheaper.

When you come to extract these parts, you start from the first one - 'music.r01' on the first DVD. After the extractor has finished with that part it then asks for 'music.r02' which you can supply by putting your second DVD which contains 'music.r02' or part 2 of your file. It will keep doing so until it finishes the last part - where hopefully you will have you complete uncompressed directory/file.

Another method is to upload the whole music collection (using a archiver/compressor first to put it into one file) onto the internet. Though 46GB sounds way above what most uploading sites will allow on one account.
But Adrive allows up to 50GB if you sign up.

Edited by Wander, 18 September 2009 - 10:54 AM.

[Wander]

Using a file compressor/archiver such as Winrar you can compress the music files into 'parts'.

E.g. music.r01, music.r02, music.r03

You can specify the size of each part in the program usually - maybe set it to a bit under 4.7GB so that each part can fit on one DVD. Doing this would probably require 10 4.7GB DVDs, which is much cheaper.

When you come to extract these parts, you start from the first one - 'music.r01' on the first DVD. After the extractor has finished with that part it then asks for 'music.r02' which you can supply by putting your second DVD which contains 'music.r02' or part 2 of your file. It will keep doing so until it finishes the last part - where hopefully you will have you complete uncompressed directory/file.

Another method is to upload the whole music collection (using a archiver/compressor first to put it into one file) onto the internet. Though 46GB sounds way above what most uploading sites will allow on one account.
But Adrive allows up to 50GB if you sign up.

Edited by Wander, 18 September 2009 - 10:54 AM.

[Neil Jones]

Uploading 50Gb of data online on an ADSL connection will take forever. Music files will not compress any further, an MP3 is compressed already.
File splitting across DVDs is an option but risky because if one part gets damaged the entire file is damaged.

You do not need to spend £100 on an external drive, you can get them much cheaper than that. You haven't been into PC World by any chance? Anyway an external drive has more uses than this one-off as you can keep everything important on it.

The easy way:
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/132412 - 320Gb hard drive for £43.99.

The do-it-yourself method:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/158389 - £6.99 for the enclosure.
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/166987 - £29.99 for a 120Gb drive. Double the capacity for an extra £5. Put the drive in the caddy and screw it in. Job done.
Total cost: £36.98 + postage.

Edited by Neil Jones, 18 September 2009 - 04:48 PM.

[==SpuD==]

Or you can get a terrabyte extremal hard drive for for£80, bit of a bargain!

http://www.amazon.co...l...2370&sr=8-1


okay i lied... £62!!

[CornishCrumpet]

Thank you so much for your help - I will look at those hard drives! Thanks also for the suggestion of uploading it onto the 'net - wil look into that as well.
Thanks again!

[==SpuD==]

i would suggest (Slightly biased opinion as this is what i use) A Netgear Storage central Manager. It connects directly to your network so any computer can use it, and it comes with a free copy of smart sync pro which is great and can automatically back up all your music for you.

http://www.reghardwa...netgear_sc101t/