Please can some kind people come and talk to me about external hard drives.

[MrsWobbleTheWaitress]

We need to get an external hard drive to get all our important stuff (mainly photos and videos, but also some documents) off our elderly computer before it packs up. Can anyone give me any advice? How much memory is it likely to need? How much should we spend? What manufacturers are good?

I'm not techno whizz but did some research into them as DH wanted one - this one had good reviews Iomega 320GB but eventually settled for this one as it was small and easy to cart around Hitachi 500GB and had more memory.

I would have thought 500GB is plenty but you can get 1TB for not much more. They seem to be coming down in price all the time, though you probably pay a bit more for ones that are small and nicely designed.

I've got a Western Digital one, which cost about £40 last summer. (the man in PC world told me it would be fine for what I wanted it for, which is photos/vids/music storage)

(am un-techy as they come so can't even remember what memory it's got) Mine is about 6 inches by 4 inches and easy peasy to sort out and carry round. (am still paranoid about losing all my photos though so also have them on disk and memory sticks)

i have a western digital elements one,500
gb. 500gb is plenty! my pc hard disk only stores up to 320gb!
you can get little tiny passport size portable ones,or bulkier heavier ones if you aren't going to be taking it everywhere.

try asking on pc advisor forum which brand is good,they are all techy geeks there!

Ooh thank you all! It doesn't need to be physically small but we do have about a gazillion photos and home movies to put on it.

Maybe we need to go to PC World.

We have got a Samsung Story Station (which you can also find in Amazon). It was about £80 for 1.5TB but isn't portable as it needs a mains lead.

We got it as it is whisper quiet and has an on/off button and was pretty good value.

You will probably find PC World are a bit overpriced compared with Amazon or Ebuyer or DABS.

We are at about 4% usage right now

Does it have to be on all the time? I was thinking I could use it just when I put new photos on the computer, or if I want to access them. Can I do that?

Ours lives in a cupboard most of the time, we only connect it when we need to use it.

It works just as like another drive for dragging and dropping files.

There was supplied software for archiving, but it can still be a little finicky occasionally (anyone know any good non-vendor specific auto backup software?)

Personally I would avoid PC World as they are (sometimes) useless and (almost always) expensive.

Put "external hard drive uk" into google and you should have no trouble beating PC World's best price.

In my experience, buying something that talks about 'one-touch backup' is not necessarily a good idea. Anything that determines what photos have changed/been added (rather than you saying what the new ones are....and you took them) is susceptible to error.

Having said that, I know Picasa is pretty good at finding new photos - I just am wary of software ( = programmers = human beings, who are fallible) making those sorts of decisions for me.

PS Just looked at the Samsung option (above) and it does look rather good..... . And 1.5 terabytes is more than anyone is likely to need, unless you're John Leslie!

What is 'one touch backup'? We have picasa and I love it, I have to say. Will I be able to put picasa onto the hard drive and use it in the same way I use the computer?

"What is 'one touch backup'?"

you press a button and the device goes away and figures out what it thinks you wanted to be archived. very simple to use, but if you have files stored somewhere unexpected it will miss them.

"Will I be able to put picasa onto the hard drive and use it in the same way I use the computer?"

You mean move picasa onto the external drive and run it from there? In theory yes, in practise I wouldn't try this since Windows can get very confused.

I'd expect music to be the biggest filler of hard drives (over 5+ years I filled 100 GB of disk space with downloaded music off USENET) but I suppose people may make more video clips these days and can store hundreds of photos.

However, as well as copying to a hard drive, it would do no harm to consider burning files away to CD. You can get 600+ MB onto a CD and many photos could be under 0.5 MB - depends on your mobile phone / camera settings.

Would echo BruceB about not using PC World (or Maplins) as the prices are often fairly high. You do pay quite a bit extra for items described as portable. Portable or "rugged" items will often cost as much or more than some devices with double or treble the storage capacity.

For many households the backup should probably sit on a shelf, powered off between times when you backup new sets of photos. It just needs you to put a bit of effort into naming folders of photos, eg 2010-Easter and 2010-xyz-birthday (where xyz is someone's name) and perhaps keep all the '2010-xxxxx' entries in a folder called 'year-2010'

That way you could save a whole year onto a CD (assuming you have under 600 MB of photos).

I mentioned CDs for backup too, partly because many hard drives have been coming out with only a 1 year warranty. I don't say the drives are less reliable, but clearly, the bigger the hard drive, the more you have to 'lose' if it ever fails.

S*d's law says your backup drive will fail 2 months after you main PC drive died, and you won't have a second backup pf everything (which is where using CDs - in addition to an external drive - may come in handy).

There are also some "online" storage solutions offering 1 to 5 GB of online space for free.

I've always been a bit nervous of archiving onto CD-R due to perceived issues with quality and longevity.

In truth, a good CD or DVD can hold data for much longer than your average hard disk will live for (no moving parts!). But it is important to purchase good quality cd and dvd's and to store them.

There did use to be a guide to CD media somewhere (I know of a guide to DVD media) that stated which brands were good and which bad - can't seem to find it these days. The only advice I remember was that cd's with gold/silver metalisation layers are usually better.

Well the ideal, from a (small) business viewpoint, is to make those backups on a frequent basis and keep some of them off site (eg home, for a business), with (grand)parents(?) for a family, so multiple copies allow for one or more to be corrupt without losing everything (and I'd encourage such CDs to be done in parallel with using an external hard drive).

Not to be too negative but keeping them away from the PC is in case of fires (!) again so that even if the PC, external hard drive, and CDs held nearby.

I suspect CDs are one of the better choices for the time being, given they've been around for ~35 years, whereas I have (in the past) bought SyQuest SparQ (1 GB per disk) and Iomega ZIP (100 MB and 250 MB) storage systems which are probably getting close to becoming 'museum pieces'. Same as using MiniDisc (still popular with radio journalists, apparently as you can cut and join audio quite easily with no tape and no need for a PC... so can be done sat in a car just before going into a live news broadcast).

Oh my goodness! More to consider!

So if we put all our photos and movies onto good quality CDs and stored them sensibly and carefully, we'd solve our data storage problem just as well, if not better than with an external harddrive? (don't have music on the computer).

So where do I find out which are the best CDs?

It's safer to do both (the CDs and the external drive).

The external drive is fine in most ways (but the fact you can over-write it means it is not immune from accidental (or deliberate) "let's delete these folders to make more room for these 400 GB of music from friend John" one day in the future when someone becomes a rebellious teenager and the "don't touch that" phrase no longer works.

Also, since the external hard drive can be written on, it is safer to unplug between backups. A virus wiping out files could spot the files on the external drive too.

These CDs are some of the more expensive the firm sells (they started off selling only blank CDs but now go on to sell blank DVDs, USB sticks, right up to PC systems.

So 14 quid (+ post) would get you storage for 60 to 70 GB (100 x 600 MB as you won't always find it easy to fill 700 MB with no 'unused' space) which should cover you for oodles of photos, and means that once written, a set can be kept at home, and after making another set, they could stay with parents.

It all depends how significant family photos are. As you already know, an external drive has many "pros" but some of the "cons" are that being so easy to write information on, things can equally be overwritten or deleted. The drive is relatively fragile - drop it from the desk and you have the {albeit low} potential to lose all data. Where years ago the smaller capacity drives often had 5 year warranty or "lifetime" warranty {for getting a replacement} the bulk of modern drives have only a year's warranty. Drives can be noisy, and it is therefore worth turning them off between backups. They are mechanical, so they can "die" just as easily as the main drive in your PC, which you copy "just in case".

Hope that's not too dreadfully depressing but for business, the rule is backup, backup, backup. Boring, but the sort of effort needed to feel safer.

Do a search for "grandfather, father, son backups" if you wish to go for a "belt and braces" strategy that has been in use for well over 30 years (something I learned about when I got my first job in IT in 1978).

Rather than spend 80 quid on storage of 1000 GB, you could buy a SATA drive docking unit and then swapping (for grandfather, father, son backups) just needs you to slide a different hard drive into the docking unit. You can buy one drive to start with, then add another 3 months later and so on. When you build up a library of music off iTunes (or from anywhere else), just buy an extra drive and stick a label "Music" on it, then add tracks to your external backup after buying new albums. It'll mean changing PCs in a couple of years is so much easier if you have peace of mind about having backup copies.