External hard drives

googler

mrsdarbs wrote: »

I got stung years ago when my main pc broke - motherboard failed or something and pc world couldn't retrieve anything! Ever since then I've tried to back stuff up, but getting a bit lax at it!

Assuming it was a mobo failure, the HDD should have been intact, and if PC World couldn't get data back from that, then words fail me....

I'd NEVER hand a computer with valuable data on the hard drive over to someone else. When it's so easy to remove it, keep it to yourself, and connect up to other PCs with caddies, docking stations, etc. ....

googler

romo wrote: »

My laptop is on the way out and I can't afford a new one, however I have about 5 years worth of photos and music i'm desperate not to loose.

Can anyone reccomend what size hard drive I might need, how much it's likely to be and where the best place to get it might be.

You need (if you have a CD or DVD writer in the laptop which works) enough CDs or DVDs to copy the photos and music onto

OR

A USB-attached hard drive of equal or larger capacity to the one that's currently in the laptop. Maplin, Amazon, PC World and a multitude of other retailers sell these.



Don't do anything else on the laptop until you've got your data copied.


When you do get them copied, as soon as you can afford another drive, make another copy of them. Make copies of new music and photos as soon as you add them.

closed

if you have space, keeping everything on the laptop, and using disk imaging software to backup everything to external hard disk, plus a second or third copy of important data (pics etc) to dvd covers most disaster scenario's (apart from theft and fire).

savebig

Go for at least a TB of data storage if in budget, in a couple of years anything you get will seem ancient and small fry.

zyonchaos

Seen in Asda just the other night 1TB external hard drives for £50, you can buy an external caddy for your laptop harddrive which will knock you back about £15 and then all you have to do is remove the hard drive from your laptop and you have a usb drive.

What exactly is wrong with the laptop though?

r2d25aa

https://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/9752934/Seagate-Expansion-Portable-320GB-2-5-inch-External-USB-2-0-Hard-Drive-Black/Product.html this one is reasonable 320GB

spike7451

zyonchaos wrote: »

Seen in Asda just the other night 1TB external hard drives for £50, you can buy an external caddy for your laptop harddrive which will knock you back about £15 and then all you have to do is remove the hard drive from your laptop and you have a usb drive.

What exactly is wrong with the laptop though?

So I can take the old hard drive out of my knackered Toshiba Equim lap top,buy one of these caddies & use it as a external USB drive for my Dell?..

Cool...:T

Any idea where I can get one of these caddies from?

Thanks.

closed

amazon, ebay, anywhere, shouldn't be more than £4-5 if you look around, you need to get either sata or pata depending on the type of hd connection

Niv

ebuyer is also good imo.

mrsdarbs

googler wrote: »

Assuming it was a mobo failure, the HDD should have been intact, and if PC World couldn't get data back from that, then words fail me....

I'd NEVER hand a computer with valuable data on the hard drive over to someone else. When it's so easy to remove it, keep it to yourself, and connect up to other PCs with caddies, docking stations, etc. ....

Thanks, bit late now, but have stored that in my memory for future reference!!