Backing up external drive. Windows 7.

[randedge]

Hello everyone!

I have an external which I would like to back up, and back up regularly at that. Sure, it's easy enough to copy for the first time, but how does one do true backups for incremental changes?

I heard this is simple enough for Mac's time machine, but it's for a laptop that runs Windows 7 and the External Drive is consequently formatted NTFS. Backup and Restore cannot seem to do it on its own.

A Google search yields mostly "backing up your internal drive into external one" - obviously not what I am looking for.
Those that do show up that might be useful, date back to 2007
http://forums.cnet.com/7723-7588_102-234666/can-you-backup-an-external-hard-drive/

Willing to try the above recommendation, but I'm curious as to what people here have used.

many thanks!

R.

[revelations]

try syncbac or cobian backup

[sabad66]

can you explain a bit more? what do you want to back up your external drive to, another external drive?

or do you mean simply backing up your laptop to your external drive?

[randedge]

I have a laptop which runs video/photo editing software (this should not really be relevant, but thought I'd mention it anyway)

ALL media is in an external drive connected via eSata. There is no media whatsoever in the laptop that runs the Operating System and Editing Program. This is common practice in the studio I used to work for: Media drive separate from the drive that runs the OS.

Advantages: Makes moving from Edit suite to mobile laptop easy enough. And, should your OS crash, your work does not disappear completely.

However, I can only backup internal drives using the preloaded programs in this laptop. What I wish to do is copy the media drive into another media drive - there seems to be no capability in Windows 7 for that. The old studio I worked for had Macs and as far as I know, they relied on Time Machine. Also, someone else always did it for me - I only concerned myself with working on projects. Now that I'm trying to become independent, well, I have to now independently learn tech stuff as well. It's a simple question, I know, and I kinda feel stupid for asking it. But sometimes the simplest things don't have obvious answers. Backing up the PC itself? Very easy and standard practice. Backing up an external drive? Info I found is from 2007 as I said. I'm sure there are better ones out there now. ? or is there?

So yes, Bottomline: I wish to copy the external hard drive that holds only media... to another external drive.