External Hard drives?

[Noggin]

I have two at the mo -

1 - 500GB which I've had a long time and has a bit of everything on it!
2 - 1TB that I bought specifically for back up (a few years ago), but has also ended up with a bit of everything

I should use a weekend soon to go through them and have a sort out. But as the others are a few years old, I feel I should get something new. Maybe using one of the old ones for laptop back up and the other for photos/films maybe


Question is, what sort of HD should I get?

Brand?
Size?
Colour?
And anything else I should look for??

[Mussels]

SSD, they are far more resilient to knocks than old fashioned disks.
The price has come way down and they can fit a lot of storage onto a small dongle, just make sure it's not so small that you'll lose it.
Don't buy from eBay or Amazon, fakes are rife but show up as the correct size when you first plug it in.
SSD tend to fail slowly so you'll notice the space very slowly decreasing, spinning disks tend to fail in one big go where you lose everything on it.

[Wreckless Rat]

Whatever you get, if the data is important, don't only have it on one of these drives...

[KungFooBob]

I'd also stick as much as you can in the cloud, there's often a limit on the free storage, but you can pay for more.

I'd deffo put the most important stuff in OneDrive or iCloud as well as on removable storage.

[exportman]

+1 for cloud.

I have everything important backed up in dropbox and Onedrive

[Noggin]

Thanx. I'll have another look

I do back up to the cloud but have been getting messages that it's nearly full, so need to look into getting more space!

I do need to spend some time looking at what's on the two drives and what is on the cloud!! Maybe next weekends job!!

[scottyuk]

If you want local storage then consider a NAS drive.

https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/the-1 ... s-reviewed

I've been running my system for many years. It's two disks that mirror each other. One disk started throwing errors (about to die) so I removed it, plugged in a new one, the system sorted itself out and I carried on without impact.

I keep my music, pictures, videos, movies, emails, documents, etc on it which means they're accessible to everyone in the house...and if you configure it whilst you're out and about. It does also back up to the cloud. I also have a HDD which I occasionally plug into it for backups. This is there in case I ever get hacked with ransom ware (where the files get encrypted and payment demanded)

[Editor]

wotcha-hopefully I hit reply not report.

Like going back to VD in here isn't it??

Right, well Apple have been wanting you to use the cloud since about TRC start date. Fair enough-plenty of corporates do exactly that nowadays

I'm a geek & I like
1 ownership
2 more than one copy

I appreciate your circumstances are rather different & you have bog all space, but I run a laptop whilst my partner has the rather better tower, in her luxury office. It has space & cabling for several drives & there is where both of our backup #1 is. I also have a 3TB external in a box & when I remember I do a system image from both of ours onto it. It also has every single scrap of data since the start. no2 then

Depends on how much you have. Our entire digital existence is just over 1TB, & TBH I don't think either of us would be upset if the films & the music suddenly vanished. Our own shot video & the photos & all the docs, ah yes. That would suck big time. So those are also stored on a series of old drives in an ancient tower retired upstairs. Copy no3.

As you know I get very twitchy about drives over 3 years old, but that's continous use. i.e. copy 3 are on IDE drives-that old!

I'm too much of a cheapskate to use SSDs as large data storages, but that is probably very sensible indeed.

In your situation (how old are these 500GB & 1TB & what make too pls smixxy?) I'd get a WD pocket drive about 2TB & use that via USB etc. Take it out, put into your bookshelf. Back up once a month or so. Have copy no2 on those older 500GGB & 1TB.

HTH

I have two at the mo -

1 - 500GB which I've had a long time and has a bit of everything on it!
2 - 1TB that I bought specifically for back up (a few years ago), but has also ended up with a bit of everything

I should use a weekend soon to go through them and have a sort out. But as the others are a few years old, I feel I should get something new. Maybe using one of the old ones for laptop back up and the other for photos/films maybe


Question is, what sort of HD should I get?

Brand?
Size?
Colour?
And anything else I should look for??