What portable hard drive to buy

lonestarfan

I've only been out to get some lunch and do a few errands and come back to 21 posts!
Thanks you everyone as debate is alway informative and is food for thought.
Thank you

Fightsback

bsod wrote: »

The question came from a home user wanting to backup a few photo's, this diversion into nas/raid solutions and what a business may use (which varies wildly) is silly.

It's not silly and perfectly reasonable, it's a question of how much you want to guard against failure and how much they want to spend to do that. Fine if you think a single USB is good enough for your data you go with that then as history is littered with back ups that were needed for recovery and oh dear they were corrupt. If you actually read my post:

"What you could do is combine a cloud solution and back up that to either a NAS or a back up drive"

ManAtHome

How much data do you & they individually need to back up and what distance between houses/do you all have internet connections? Could bring up other possibilities (Email/FTP, DVDs, Memory Sticks etc).

Anne_Marie_2

OP, I'm found the Samsung portable hard drives to be good. I've got three, and another coming in a few weeks, when my visitors bring another over for me.
Comes in a variety of sizes as you would expect.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-Slimline-Portable-Hard-Drive/dp/B008PABFX8

Think it will be difficult keeping all photographs backed up frequently enough in one place between potentially four households, but that's not what you've asked.

lonestarfan

We had our first digital camera in Dec 2004 so we've now got 10 yrs of photos. We transfer them to the 4 computers we own between us. We all have different cameras and phones etc and we've often relied on one person to take photos and then share or sometimes we've all taken the photos so all in all they all really belong to all of us and one of us is going to be without historical photos when we pass away so I'm trying to do this for the grandkids really so they have the history. So we offload photos to pc, then we burn a cd of them as our first back up. Occasionally I've done it on a usb stick if I haven't had a disc to hand. Now my pc has bust and the new one is coming tomorrow and it only has a dvd rewriter not a cd drive so from now on I'll back up to dvd on my PC but the other 3 pple will still back up to cd. I realise that the media we use will deteriorate over time so I'm planning on getting as many printed out as well. A recent news article about this a month or so ago by a head of a technology firm commented on this issue and said people need to print them out as well because over time they will be lost with media changing, developing and deterioration of it over time. So my plan is transfer to desktop, back up to a cd or dvd, save to a portable hard drive and finally print out. I think I'm going to go the route of giving the 2 other households their own portable hard drive as I've tried Flickr and we went off it and I'm not sure cloud is right for us. Thanks everyone.

enfield_freddy

a dvd writer will write to a cd or a dvd, however a dvd will hold about 10 times as many photos (4.7 gig as opposed to 0.7 gig), I would be surprised if the other 3 people have only cd writers

lonestarfan

enfield_freddy wrote: »

a dvd writer will write to a cd or a dvd, however a dvd will hold about 10 times as many photos (4.7 gig as opposed to 0.7 gig), I would be surprised if the other 3 people have only cd writers

Thanks. I did wonder if it might write both a cd and DVD so that's helpful info and I'm really pleased about that. I did know a DVD will hold more but thanks for the info.
You might be right about the others probably isn't just a cd rewriter. Thank you.

enfield_freddy

good quality dvd writers to fit a std computer can be bought for about £12


in a standard PC it can take less than 10 minutes to change one over from a cd writer , you can then read and write dvds and do the same with CDs ,