recommendations for external hard drive

biccynana

any recommendations for an external hard drive to back up my data (having lost two, non-backed up hard drives in as many years I've finally learned my lesson). Not a lot of data, mostly photos. I've got a 250MB hard drive in a Dell laptop, if that makes any difference. Is external storage better/safer/easier to recover than say Windows 7 back up facility?

Thanks
Michael

Ximian

It really depends on where you are backing up, if you have a hard drive that has a partition or area that you are backing up to then you could end up with data loss due to the hard drive failing or corruption. It also depends on how valuable and important your data is, you could back up to DVD for some of your data and have an external drive for other data or duplicate data in the case of losing or damaging the DVD or the external hard drive. I back important data up to an external 1TB drive and have a NAS server for OS back ups.

I have a Samsung Story 1TB (USB) external drive, it's a large unit as it houses a full size hard drive (3.5") and requires external power, and I use TrueCrypt to encrypt sensitive data. Some of the external drives now have built in hardware encryption, like the Buffalo 1TB (model number: HD-PXT1TU2/B-EU). Unfortunately, hard drive prices are high at the moment, if you're not in a rush to buy one it might be worth holding off for a month or more and backing up to DVD/USB flash drive in the meantime.

newDude

Use cloud back-up, so easy and retrievable where ever you are. You can get free service from somewhere like Dropbox.