External Data Storage

glitter123

Can anyone give me some advice please?

I need to buy something I can store mainly my 1000+ digital photos - at the moment they are clogging up my PC and laptop, plus i'd like them to all be in one place. It needs to be simple to use.

Any recommendations for size/manufacturer?

deano23285

give this one a look, its 1TB in size and is very popular with good reviews on amazon

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Buffalo-DriveStation-1-0TB-External-Drive/dp/B004LFLCFC/ref=sr_1_2?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1326985355&sr=1-2

googler

What's the total file size of the current photos, and how do you expect this to grow in future?

Trust me, you don't want them in one place and one place only. If you copy them to another drive, you either want to leave them on the PC too, or get two external drives to make two copies.

You could consider adding extra internal drives to the desktop PC. My desktop started out with one, and I've now got four. Even if the motherboard only has ports for two, if you have a PCI slot, you can get a PCI board with expansion slots.

googles_2

I have an iomega external hard drive and it has been very reliable for the past couple of years. I keep copies of internal hard drive data on it. hth.

marleyboy

http://www.google.co.uk/products/catalog?q=usb+flash+drive&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=shop&cid=5502557742175013114&sa=X&ei=_D0YT_2rFM23hAfWhKWvDA&ved=0CJABEPMCMAE

At 16Gig its ample for your photos and for less than a tenner you cannot go wrong

Lifeforms

You could also look at a NAS setup. Which works like an external HDD, but is over the network so allows all computers attached to the network to access it. There are multiple NAS solutions out there to suit whatever setup you'd use. On the plus side you don't need to drag an external HDD around with you to each computer, you can use it for other files as well, music, video etc, and space ranges from hundreds of gigs, to Terra-bytes as you can often choose the HDD's you want in there. It's by no means a cheap solution however, and as has been said, even if you put the files you want onto another storage solution (aka external, flash drive, DVD's, memory card etc) you must also keep an additional copy elsewhere too. No one media solution is perfectly safe, so you should back up elsewhere.

With some NAS' you can get RAID set ups too (in the most basic form, it will backup to another hdd, therefore if one hdd dies, the other has the data etc)

Edited to say: NAS stands for Network Attached Storage

andy2004

At the moment buying an external is expensive, they have literally doubled in the past 3 months, example would have been the 2tb for £75, which is now £130.
even when copying to an external drive i would also recommend burning to dvd-r/+r or dvd dl as an extra precaution and maybe creating 2 of each dvd and putting somewhere safe.
anyone with a high enough powered magnet can wipe the contents of a hdd. say from a large speaker from a hi-fi.

santer_2

I use these as they can be sited in a safe place and then you only need to carry a USB key to access the data from any computer in the World, so the data is available to your home network and anyone you supply a USB key to

Having it sited once only, it avoids being dropped in transit etc

http://www.my-ditto.com/html/my-ditto-does-more.html

Linbox

If you want to KEEP your images the preference would be a external hard drive.

Lifeforms

Linbox wrote: »

If you want to KEEP your images the preference would be a external hard drive.

That's unfair to say, it comes down to personal preference usually. You can put them on whatever you want essentially. Nothing will ever "keep" them forever. There are many things that can go wrong with any of the methods listed here, from DVD burning, to External HDD's, to even what I suggested, NAS.

Everything should be backed up, which means if you want something off a laptop or desktop, then you need to plan to povide two methods of storing them. Be it a flash drive, and external (for example only) to a DVD, and a flash drive. Whatever is chosen, needs to be checked regularly too. Not much cop burning a DVD, throwing it in a drawer somewhere, to just rely on the flash drive that after a year, you have just put through the washing machine and tumble dryer. (said DVD in draw could've degraded, and thus you have no back ups left)

sillygoose

I have just added one of these NAS drives to my network, very easy to manage and great value at £58, plus 2 x 2TB Samsung Green drives at £99 each. Using it in Raid 1 configuration. Gradually sorting all the files on our computers to this central resource. Setup as a mapped drive getting everyone used to saving on it instead of the individual PC's. Then I only need to plug a large USB drive into this to perform a back up once a week.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/D-Link-ShareCenter-Network-Storage-Enclosure/dp/B004AIWOXY/ref=sr_1_1?m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1326994784&sr=1-1