External Hard drive wanted

bushcaro

Hi,

Can anyone recommend where to buy an External Hard drive for a non techie person - want a plug and play ..is memory size the main factor I need to think about
I currently use a work laptop for all my PC use - thus have personal docs, pictures etc on it. There have been redundancies in the last weeks where the employees have been given no notice.
Thus I want to copy my docs - just in case.

Thansk

posted_2

A DVD is cheaper, and more secure.

Marty_J

This is really good value:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/145041

I think a number of our members have ordered it, and they all seem very pleased.

I'm not sure why a DVD is "more secure", but it's certainly cheaper.

bushcaro

Thanks..I saw somewhere in a thread - there is Back up within Windows - can someone advise where I find it - or will resort to copying and pasting..Thanks

basmic

DVDs are not safer - they are much more vulnerable than external harddrives, in the sense that one scratch could render 4GB of data useless! Fine, if you dropped a harddrive from about 5ft you could be kissing away 1TB of data - but that's unlikely!

I use an external harddrive for my own personal backups, and just copy and paste to be honest.

stuvee02

posted wrote: »

A DVD is cheaper, and more secure.

Not from what I've read and experienced; writable DVD and CD discs will degrade over time so you'd need to keep re-copying the data onto new discs periodically.
If you are looking for a back up device you do need to consider the issue of data integrity and another way around the risk of losing data on discs through degradation or loss data on an external HDD or internal HDD through fire or flood etc is online backups there's some reasonable free options or better subscriptions.

If you're simply looking for additional storage for data that you're not going to be devastated to lose should something go wrong then external HDD is the simplest and probably the cheapest (£/Gb).

I already have a Western Digital 'My Book' external HDD and I'm very satisfied with it. I'm thinking of buying another and quite possibly will buy another of the same.

HTH

Stu

Bambi234

bushcaro wrote: »

Thanks..I saw somewhere in a thread - there is Back up within Windows - can someone advise where I find it - or will resort to copying and pasting..Thanks

In my own personal experience Windows backup should be avoided like the plague. it doesn't back up the files individually it backs them up as a whole and then when you try to reinstall if any part of that image backup is corrupted you have lost all of your data.

My own personal backup plan is to copy important folders such as My Documents etc and then burn them onto a DVD. I also use an online backup there are quite a few of these around.

I always used the approach if it is not backed up in two places it is not backed up at all. Heaven forbid there was a burglary or a fire. In both cases both the original and one backup would be gone.

guitarinacase

I recently bought a Western Digital My Passport which has a huge 320gb memory. Very simple to use and is powered via the USB cable. Similar to Stuvee02, I am actually considering buying another one so that I can "spread the risk".

posted_2

Take a look through this forum, and you will see numerous threads with people panicking about dead external hard drives, and virus infections. These problems aren't rare, they are commonplace. DVD's avoid both issues.

2 examples in the last 3 days

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=1616531

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?p=20436625

etc.

You won't see many "I've got an unreadable scratched DVD with all my data on". 2 DVD copies stored safely costs less than 1% of the cost of a usb drive, does the job, with enough spare to buy a £10 8GB flash drive on top, and still be quids in. 1TB £70+ drives for a few documents and photos is overkill, and not a resilient solution.

http://www.getdropbox.com/pricing

timbim_2

For moving data between two computers, hard to beat a USB HDD. For a long term backup, DVD's win hands down.

Marty_J

I wouldn't be so sure about that. I've seen many threads here where someone can't read a DVD-R because it has deteriorated. I have a several DVD-R and CD-R disks that are a few years old and don't work anymore. The fact is the long-term stability of recordable optical media is unknown.

You'd need over 200 DVD-RW to back up the same amount of data that a 1 TB drive can, and writing to and reading from DVDs is a lot slower.