External hard drive for netbook?

sammyjammy

I've just acquired a netbook and already have a laptop, would it be sensible to get an external hard drive to enable me to backup the netbook?

Also would I be able to save programme files (such as Microsoft office) on the external drive and use them on the netbook?

Any recommendations or all they all much of a muchness?

Sam

davb

Yes it would be a good idea.
There are two main types, portable - which use 2.5" hard drives and get the power from the USB connection - and desktop, which use 3.5" drives and have an external power adapter. The desktop will be faster, but not as portable.
And yes, you would be able to copy the Office installation file onto it, and run the install from there.

sammyjammy

Thank you Davb for the very prompt and helpful reply.

Sam

John_Gray

It would be very sensible to have some form of backup mechanism for the user data on both your laptop or netbook, either an external hard drive, or a large(ish) USB Flash Drive, or even an external DVD writer.

Decide how much you want to back up (USB Flash Drives of 32 GB and above are disproportionally more expensive than 16 GB and below, at present).

External hard drives can either have a separate power supply (most of those above 500 GB), or can use one or preferably two adjacent USB sockets for power and data transfer (leaving only one spare on your netbook). Look very carefully at their specs if you really want to avoid a separate power supply.

External DVD writers tend to be expensive in consumables, and limited in data capacity.

Hard drives are much of a muchness, in that you may get a Friday Afternoon example from almost any manufacturer. Have a look for reviews of those you fancy, in case there are more problems than you might reasonably expect on specific models.

John_Gray

Since Office has to be installed on each PC/laptop/netbook, you may have licensing issues. Of course data files from Office (documents, spreadsheets, etc) can be stored on a backup device, either using the Save As process, or copying them later from netbook/laptop hard drive to an external backup mechanism.