External Hard Drive Questions...

[Dennis Sherrod]

And along those lines, if you have to send a drive off, choose a reputable company that someone can vouch for. I have heard of at least three incidents where the people getting the information recovered were victims of identity theft not long after the work was completed. If at all possible, do the recovery yourself. A lot of times, you can buy another drive for cheap of the exact model and swap out the controller board if it's something electronic. If it's a corrupt hard drive, freeware utilities can recover the data. Check out http://www.myharddrivedied.com/presentations.html for LOTS of ways to fix drives yourself. Sorry, didn't mean to deviate from the original topic.

Eric,
Thank you. I will look into this. That is one thing that worried me about sending this off. I could change passwords on everything, but there is a still a ton of personal ID info.

Rob,
You are right. I had a good surge protector and still had the crash. I gather the power spike / surge, what-have-you, is what helped kill the computer, as all the clocks were off in the house too when I got home.

Again, sorry, did not mean to hijack thread.

 

[Dan Robinson]

You can trust external drives for anything you do. I've lived off of external drives for the past 6 years, all of my data is on them (video, photos, web sites, graphics, etc). Every year or so I have to get a pair of bigger drives to hold everything (I always buy in pairs, one primary and one for backup), and at this point I have 10 external drives ranging from 250GB to 1TB. I just bought the pair of 1TB drives this year. I have Maxtors, Seagates and Western Digitals, and out of ten drives, I've only had one go bad (a Seagate 500GB). The unit that went bad was actually the enclosure hardware, the drive inside was still good.

I like being able to have all of my data in one place that I can take anywhere. I can fill stock video orders and do web site work with my laptop on the road just as if I was at home or at the office. When I move to a bigger drive, the old ones are relegated to offsite backup duty. I keep three of them ready for footage deliveries, they've been shipped all over the country the past 2 years for that.

 

[Jayson Prentice]

Dustin, an external hard drive is a great investment, whether you go for one that you enclose yourself or just go ahead and by a true external one ready to go. I went out last Friday and picked up a 640GB Western Digital for only $70, they are really fairly cheap for how much you can fit onto them. All of the seagate, western digital, or the maxtor all have had good reviews and I think they are the top of the line so to say for what you can get.

Like someone previous said, it's always nice if you have two of them as well. My photography is being backed up onto two different externals, and then also going to be burnt to DVD (one of my christmas break projects). This stuff is something that you don't want to lose, so backups are always good and fairly cheap!

 

[Robert Edmonds]

On another note, keeping a backup maintained and up to date is important. Every few weeks I would copy those important files over. Also, I would recommend a back up of a back up. I kept a back up copy of important files before my last computer crashed, then when I got my new computer with extra space I quickly copied it back to my new computer. Guess what happened a few weeks ago, my backup external hard drive failed. It's annoying to deal with the backing up stuff, but much less so then loosing all of my photos, docs, etc... Now I just need to get my back hard drive working again.