External hard drive

[Nathaniel]

After the problem I had of losing quite a lot of my files and photos due to my computer crashing, I am looking to buy an 1 TB External HDD for my desk top computer (HP Pavillion) to back up my files,photos etc. Can any member suggest a decent model within my budget of £50- £60?. The software I use is windows Vista and similar such as microsoft word,spreadsheet etc.

Many thanks

Nathaniel

[paulr5604]

Re: External hard drive

This one is 2TB for £60 it is USB 3.0 but is backwards compatible with USB 2.0 I use a seagate one and haven't had any issues.
http://www.ebuyer.com/384253-seagate...ve-stbv2000200

[Riggers]

Re: External hard drive

If this will contain precious photos then its always good practice to keep the backup at another location as this protects you against fire and burglary. So I would recommend a portable one. Like Paul says USB3 can make the data transfer much faster when doing the backup (1TB can literally take days on USB2). If you don't have USB3 ports on your computer then you can buy a USB3 PCI card which is easy to fit.

[Riggers]

Re: External hard drive

If buying a PCI card for USB3 be careful as there is PCI and PCI express so you need to check what ports you have available on your motherboard and order the correct one. It's easy to tell which is which just by looking at the PINs in these pictures.

PCI express: http://www.ebuyer.com/350321-pci-exp...ng-n-expci-4pa

PCI: http://www.ebuyer.com/262168-2-port-...r-uk-pciusb3s2

[Nathaniel]

Re: External hard drive

Thank you Paul and Riggers. I have ordered the Seagate HD as advised. I might mention that I have two unused USB ports on my computer and I am sure I can plug this into one of those. Re the photos, I am also now downloading & saving them on to a CD/DVD disk as soon as I download my pics from the memory card to my computer; I also don't format the memory card till I have actually saved the pics on to my CD.

Regards
Nat

[Riggers]

Re: External hard drive

CDs & DVDs are an expensive, cumbersome and time consuming way of backing things up these days Nat. A portable USB drive around the size of a small smart phone can hold hundreds of times more data and is a lot easier to copy files to than having to burn discs (just drag and drop in windows explorer).

Regarding the USB ports on your computer those are likely to be USB2 not USB3. That's fine as long as you don't have lots and lots of data to back up, but if you will periodically be copying a complete drive's worth to a backup drive (e.g. around 1TB of data) then USB2 will be very slow. USB3 si around 10 times faster I believe so 1 day on USB2 becomes a couple of hours on USB3.

[Paulstw]

Re: External hard drive

You could sign up to a cloud storage service like Dropbox or something. I have 25Gb of dropbox storage for the pics that I know I want to keep. I have 25Gb of Skydrive, and 7Gb in Good Drive. I can get access to these files anywhere I have an internet connection. Also remember Flickr has 1Tb of storage. Just set the images to private and stick them in a set called backup :)

[Nathaniel]

Re: External hard drive

Thank you Riggers and Paul. I already have Dropbox which I have not used much preferring to transfer images to flickr. On flickr I have said "public" as I have no objections to people (public) taking a look, which a few have done-occasionally.

[Riggers]

Re: External hard drive

Never thought of cloud or Flickr but I'm using about 700GB of raw files and jpegs so not really a viable option for me. It all depends how much you have.

[antoeknee]

Re: External hard drive

I currently have 2 x 3tb drives and download images to one and have piece of software that puts copy to second drive.
Have folder on the drive for my best images and this syncs to Dropbox.

[AndyA]

Re: External hard drive

You could sign up to a cloud storage service like Dropbox or something. I have 25Gb of dropbox storage for the pics that I know I want to keep. I have 25Gb of Skydrive, and 7Gb in Good Drive. I can get access to these files anywhere I have an internet connection. Also remember Flickr has 1Tb of storage. Just set the images to private and stick them in a set called backup :)

I use Box.net and Dropbox cloud storage, the handy thing with this, is that I can have access from various sources. I also use a secondary internal hard drive and I also use an external USB drive (just in case).

[2Beers]

Re: External hard drive

you could also try pcworld cloud storage 1TB £150 for 5 years or £50 per year

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/knowhow-cloud-1315-commercial.html?intcmp=menulink~cloud

[Nathaniel]

Re: External hard drive

Thanks folks for your good advice. Quite a lot to chew on. I'll let you know what I finally decide on.

Once again, many thanks.

Nat

[Nathaniel]

Re: External hard drive

Just thought I'd mention that I have bought the 2TD seagate external hard drive and I will see how I go from here.I also have the other options that all you good members have mentioned and I am keeping these in mind- actually printed out this thread for my file!

[AndyA]

Re: External hard drive

As long as you have 2 copies of 'the' files, you have a backup. Having only 1 copy of a file, even if it's on a separate drive, isn't a backup.