What portable hard drive to buy

lonestarfan

Can anyone give me some advice on a reliable quality portable hard drive to buy please. I need one to store all the photos on as a back up from 4 different members of the family. They all have their own pc but we would like to store them in one place as a back up and start to get them all printed out also. Thanks.

enfield_freddy

are all the pc,s in the same building ? if so , consider a nas drive , many of which can have 2 or more disks installed and the ability to set them up in "raid" formation , if one drive goes down , the data will be retained on the other until a new drive is fitted.


portable drives are now beginning to fail , (end of short warrantys) and data is being lost , also they are suseptable to being dropped etc.


I have a dlink dns320l nas , and whenever I am repairing a computer , just make a directory called "fred" or whatever , copy the customers data over , repair and copy back.

Fightsback

If you want reliable and safe back up I'd suggest a RAID NAS but it will cost you more than a single USB based back up drive.

I'm assuming all family members live in the same house, if not you could consider a shared cloud alternative but this leaves you at the mercy of the cloud provider. What you could do is combine a cloud solution and back up that to either a NAS or a back up drive.

It's all a question of budget

Edit:
Beat me too it Freddy

enfield_freddy

some nice Pi setups about now using a 3.5 usb caddy


I did find an easier way , that allowed all bar 20 meg of a drive be accessable , without a Nas programme but not in raid format

lonestarfan

No we're not all in the same house. don't like the idea of cloud but thanks for the suggestion. Not sure I understand the rest lol. Nothing's ever simple when I've got enough to do without all this lol !
I'll look into this nas thing then.
Any other ideas?
Thanks

enfield_freddy

A nas drive is a small box containing one or more hard drives , it plugs into the mains and has a wire running to your router


its contents can be seen by your and any other computers connected to your network by wire or wifi , you can copy over and take files off just by a click of the mouse.


unless all the users are in the same property , this will not work ,


look a <spit> Pc charm http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/data-storage/hard-drives/portable-external-hard-drives/720_7064_70069_xx_xx/xx-criteria.html and pick at random.


they are all built to last 1 day longer than there warranty , and there is no warranty help in retrieving your files.


now the good news:




its not raining here

Fightsback

lonestarfan wrote: »

No we're not all in the same house. don't like the idea of cloud but thanks for the suggestion. Not sure I understand the rest lol. Nothing's ever simple when I've got enough to do without all this lol !
I'll look into this nas thing then.
Any other ideas?
Thanks

A NAS (Network attached storage) is a box that plugs into the back of your router and acts as a storage device on your home network and may contain one or more hard drives. You can set this to have two hard drives or more (called RAID) where one drive is a copy of the other so that if one drive fails you can still have a copy of your data. It's a more complicated (and more expensive) situation than a simple USB drive but provides more surety against data loss through failure of a drive.

My own personal recommendation would be a Synology NAS drive, a tad on the expensive side but excellent none the less.

Here is an example (note hard drives are extra) :

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00FWURI8K/ref=twister_B00GPG7H9U

It's all a question of how much do you want to spend ?

enfield_freddy

they can have my DNS320l with 2 x 2t wd red drives for a good price!


http://www.amazon.co.uk/D-Link-ShareCenter-DNS-320L-Network-Enclosure/dp/B00NPX59UA/ref=sr_1_4?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1427721708&sr=1-4&keywords=dns320l

bsod

The question was about a portable hard drive for backup, not an overblown geeky nas solution.

Just pick one you like the look of, western digital, seagate, hitachi, samsung, toshiba are the main brands, and use it for backup, not originals.

The comment about them lasting one day longer than their warranty is silly, as is using a raspberry pi.

enfield_freddy

oh gosh , refer back to the link to PCCharm to posts above ,


in case you missed it , http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/data-storage/hard-drives/portable-external-hard-drives/720_7064_70069_xx_xx/xx-criteria.html


and the reason a Network device was suggested , was the OP said it was for 4 pople to use , gosh 4 , almost a network!

Fightsback

bsod wrote: »

The question was about a portable hard drive for backup, not an overblown geeky nas solution.

Just pick one you like the look of, western digital, seagate, hitachi, samsung, toshiba are the main brands, and use it for backup, not originals.

I wouldn't trust my entire family's photos to a single back up drive and wouldn't recommend it, whoopsy daisy did you just drop that usb HDD six feet onto concrete ?