Another external hard drive bites the dust... how do you successfully back up and store stuff?

[NestMaker]

I've had it with the blimmin things, this one was three years old though so I need a new one or something else for storage.

I'm wanting to back up my laptop, store about 7GB photos, 16GB videos and 55GB music. Plus room for more in the future. I would also love to be able to record TV because my TV has that function but nothing to record it to.

Has anyone got any suggestions of robust hard drives or should I go cloudy? I'm pretty clueless so don't know where to start looking really. Any help would be much appreciated

You would be netter getting an SSD external drive

www.amazon.co.uk/b?node=430547031

If you have a google account Google Drive gives you 15GB free

Thanks, that's just the pointer I needed. I'll have a look in the morning and get something ordered before I have a laptop disaster (this has happened before when I was having back up troubles!)

Are you using a mains-powered external drive, or one which pulls power from your USB port?

I've 1-4TB externals (mains) that are 6+ yrs old with no problems, think it's the power mechanism or cable that's failing you.

I recommend Western Digital or Seagate externals.

I was expecting it to last a bit longer

It's a mains powered WD My Book 2TB. It switches on fine, blue light etc then turns to red and sounds a bit whirry. I did try WD troubleshooting ideas but nothing is working.

Just want to get something sorted as I'm very anxious that nothing is currently backed up.

Raid drives back up in parallel and if one drive fails, the other is there to compensate.

Um, I'm not techy, what does that mean Phoenix

It means your my my book should still have all your data on it somewhere as it probably has more than one disk in it. Often its the disk controller that goes you may just be able to take out the disks and put them in another unit. Or take it to a shop.

The easiest way is o use some sort of cloud service but you will prob have to pay a bit for it. I use office 365/one drive from Microsoft (can get for about £20 a year) and back up everything to there.

Put most important stuff on a USB drive and email to yourself for now

RAID = Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.

RAID comes in various levels. IIRC the simplest is level 1, 2 mirrored disks, so if one disk dies, the second has exactly the same data on it.

Another possibly useful term is NAS, which is networked attached storage. This is a box containing 1 or more disks, which you just plug into your network and it can be attached as a network drive.

A cheap basic NAS is the D-Link DNS-320 (probably superseded), which takes 2 disks and can be set up with a mirrored disk configuration. There are plenty of other options out there, I just mention that as one example, not as a recommendation.