Format a hard drive?

[Bootsie]

If I buy a Seagate 500GB FreeAgent Desktop Drive, will it come with a bunch of automatic back-up software on it? I want to be able to do my own backups buy just copy and paste kind of thing so that I can organize them on my own. Will this drive need to be formatted to remove the software?

What is the best way to back-up your data onto an external hard drive?

[Artdime]

I have one of these disks, and no, you don't have to reformat it if you don't want to. There are some utilities and I think the pdf manual, but all that is in a separate directory which you can just delete.

Regarding backups, there is a wide variety of software out there, both free and commercial. I use a program called Backer (http://cordes-dev.com (http://cordes-dev.com/)), it works great for me.

Good luck!

[tunin]

That is a set of questions that require quite an answer. I would say YES and NO for the format part, depends what you want the file system to be!? If the drive that you buy is ready for usage in FAT32 file format and you want it NTFS then yes, it needs a format and vice versa... Re. backups, as artdime suggested, there is a number of ways to backup, my favorite would be manual transfer of photos, music and video and a DRIVE-folder SYNC. software or use something LIKE Acronis TrueImage and do incremental of full backups of your drive. I hope this helps.

[the.digital.guy]

The drive comes already Formatted.
As far as Back-Up software......the Seagate 500GB FreeAgent PRO Desktop drive comes with it. Only the PRO version.