What is the difference between backing up your files on an external hard drive and copying your files to an external hard drive?
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ANSWERS: 2
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none as long as you do one or the other, both mean to save you files to a external drive. just different ways of saying it. although some external drives do have the ability to automatically backup files for you, such as FreeAgent. copy usually means to pull files across from drive to drive.
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In the technical sense, backing up refers to using software to manage the task of copying parts or all of a drive to another media. This may or may not include compressing the files and or scheduling when the backup will occur (so that it doesn't interfere with normal use. Unlike pure manual copying, backing up files using backup software tends to package the files in a manner that forces you to use the same software to access the backup set if you want to restore any of those files. Whereas with a manual copy, the files are exact copies of each other and don't require any special processing to access the copy. The drawback is that it's completely manual.
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