New Philosophy-External Drive

I'm replacing my laptop (again) due to a display issue and I want to try a new philosophy going forward. I replace my computer usually every other year. It is my lifeline with my work. The fact that I have to buy another laptop so I can get this one fixed speaks volumes. What I want to do is store all my data on a passport drive as opposed to the laptop drive. That way, I'll really only have programs on my PC. Also, when I get this laptop fixed, I can reload all the programs and put it at my lake house and just bring my passport drive when I go up there instead of my laptop. One thing that will be critical will be that the drive always has to be the same "letter." I'm not sure how to do that. Does anyone have any thoughts on this whole philosophy?

 

Saving all your documents to an external drive makes a lot of sense.
If you have a laptop with, say C, and A DVD DRIVE at D, I would say that the external drive will show up as E, unless, you use other attachments, like a dongle, a usb stick, etc: when it will move up a letter for each component .
I regularly change my back up external hard drive to several computers, and never have a problem, using it as I set up my partitions , so that my dvd and dvd rw already recognised, then put in a couple of usb sticks, and then attached my external hard drive,and it became letter K-

 

With the drive attached you can use Disk Management to assign a letter to a drive, and the next time you attach that drive it will take the same drive letter. You need to do this on each computer you intend attaching it to, and to avoid conflicts the chosen letter should be high enough that no other device you plug in might take it. So X would be fine.

You can access Disk Management by right clicking (My) Computer and clicking Manage.

 

This is good info. Thanks. So do you guys think it's feasible to basically store my work (life) on an external drive thus ignoring the normal hard drive? This is really out of the box thinking on my part and I'm not sure how comfortable I am yet.

Edited to add that on this notebook (Toshiba Satellite Pro), I'm still running XP Pro. I can't find the "manage" option.

 

Passport drives are no more stable then a computer Hard Drive, not to mention the passport could be lost or stolen along with all of your data. Redundant backups are important no matter where you store the data.

I would recommend using your programs as you have been doing and do a daily or weekly backup to a passport which you could restore to your other computer when your at the lake. Or you could use the passport as the main storage for the data and back it up to the 2 computer Hard Drives on a regular basis. No matter what, do backups somewhere.

To access the disk manager go to Start > Run > type diskmgmt.msc and hit enter. Find the drive in the lower portion and right click the mouse on it and go to "Change Drive Letter.." I would suggest making the drive letter something down the line somewhere like J or K or something so any other device you connect won't become confused with it.

 

You can use the alternative method described by schnerdly, but it's there -

 

I have found that from XP to Vista, and Windows 7,
Right click 'my computer, click manage, click disc management to see all partitions/hard drives to be a convenient way to remember.
Also, as suggested, a back up can be lost by -actual loss, theft, etc:, and I would beware of the larger hard drives, as my son lost all his data on a 1tb hard drive, so a couple of smaller one's can make sense- you can also use a program like xxclone to copy the partition of the laptop to on one of these, as a complete backup to your laptop's, if you wanted to-saves hours of work, and you can be running again, in no time, if your laptop hard drive gets corrupted,or, badly infected.

 

Since eveyone is offering their favorite way of opening Disk Management here's another. Type com in Vista or Win 7's Start > Search box and click Computer Management.

I've never been much on keyboard shortcuts and the like but in Vista and 7 this method can be handy for those things you use a lot. Try sys for example.