What's Next?

Don't Delete

Resist the impulse to "clean up" your external drive.

Your external drive is your free insurance policy; don't tamper with it. It has more space than you could ever use, and by deleting files you will violate your agreement to be able to recover from a hard disk crash AND you'll make backups a tad slower by introducing fragmentation.

Don't Defragment

I am of the opinion that defragmentation was vitally important in the days of 5 megabyte (yes!) hard drives and 3600rpm drives and 100 millisecond access times.

Today some hard drives are hard memory (a memory key for example has no rotational delay), and RAM memory serves as a massive disk cache for most machines.

I am also of the opinion that hard drives fail (this is why we are here, right?), and that needless and mindless defragmentation serves only to advance the day when the hard drive fails.

Don't thrash the drive to trash the drive.

Expansion

Now that I am using TrueCrypt and RoboCopy on one machine, can I use them on my other computers?

Yes. You could treat each computer as a stand-alone computer and repeat this exercise.

I developed a small set of batch files that will backup multiple computers (on a home network) to multiple external drives.

Each computer makes its own backup, and then continues working or shuts down, as you prefer.

The main computer waits until each LAN computer backup is complete before dismounting the encrypted drives. The main computer too can be shut down automatically after the backup, if you prefer.

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