External Hard Drive

[top4718]

Can anybody recommend a decent external hard drive to back up a HP laptop, don't want to pay loads for one and it is purely back up in case of hard drive faults.

[neeeeeeeeeek]

All pretty much the same from my experience.

 

If you get a laptops drive (2.5inch) you don't need additional power so that is an advantage.

 

How big is the hard drive / how much data do you need to back up ? I might be able to flog you one.

Edited December 22, 2015 by neeeeeeeeeek

[top4718]

All pretty much the same from my experience.

 

If you get a laptops drive (2.5inch) you don't need additional power so that is an advantage.

 

How big is the hard drive / how much data do you need to back up ? I might be able to flog you one.

 

Its only for photos/videos and a few word documents mate, just not stuff I'd want to lose if the internal one failed as my sons just has.

[IT-Smith]

I would use the 3.5” desktop hard drives for backup, as you get less problems with power as they are mains powered.

Also the 2.5” laptop hard drive platters can be made out of glass so don’t like been dropped.

And do not leave the drive plugged in all to time, run the backup and then unplug it. Just in case you get a nasty virus that tries to delete everything.

It is also worth having 2 drives so you can rotate them, and maybe keep one offsite.

I use SyncBackFree to do my backups. http://www.2brightsparks.com/download-syncbackfree.html

2TB desktop drives start around £60.

If you have documents that are really important, email them to yourself if you have a cloud email account (Hotmail/googlemail etc).

The 3 2 1 backup strategy. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/

[Kidorry]

Would you have enough room on a large memory stick?

[mimic]

Its only for photos/videos and a few word documents mate, just not stuff I'd want to lose if the internal one failed as my sons just has.

 

For the photo's and docs, use cloud... Google Drive or OneDrive etc.

 

As for external, I use a mix of Toshiba and WD 2.5" (Toshiba being better IMO) Also high capacity USB and Micro SD. Don't buy cheap though. The one that has given me the best service is a Kingston Hyper X 128GB USB stick. Still going strong after nearly 2 years. Quite bulky for a thumb drive but good quality and decent transfer speeds. The Micro SD that I've found to be good is the Lexar 633X 128GB.

[melthebell]

Id say a decent flash drive stick if you dont have too much, just photos and a few vids, maybe a 32 or 64gb one?

[swarfendor437]

The issue with Memory Sticks is like SSD's they have a limited life in terms of number or read/writes. Why just backup data when you can backup the entire system for when you need to replace the hard drive?

 

1. http://www.ebuyer.com/282538-buffalo-1tb-velocity-drivestation-hd-lx1-0tu3-eu

 

2. And use this excellent free software to backup your entire OS and data:

 

http://redobackup.org/

[AlexAtkin]

Flash memory is a bad choice for backups as there is a finite time between when you write data to them and when it becomes unreadable because the electrical charge has faded. They also are far more prone to fail without warning.

 

HDDs on the other hand, it can take decades for the data to fade and most often when the drive starts to fail you will still be able to recover a lot of the data. There are no guarantees, but HDDs are a far more proven, stable storage for backups.

[Marx]

I have one of these. Just connect it to your computer, drop in any SATA drive and you can use it as an external drive if it is formatted.