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Purchasing a Backup Hard Drive
When looking for a backup hard drive, one naturally
looks for an external hard drive. Such hard drives can be
easily attached to your desktop or notebook PC by a simple
USB or other interface. Hard drives have shrunk in size
recently and many are fully portable allowing you to take
them with you in your pocket, your briefcase, or your laptop
computer back. External hard drives are divided into two
separate categories one, the portable, self powered hard
drive; and to the external AC powered hard drives.
Portable
versus Traditional Hard Drives
Portable hard drives are small enough to
fit in your pocket and powered by its own USB connection
(also known as USB-powered) so you don't need to carry around a bulky, heavy AC
adapter. However, since these hard drives are smaller and
require less power, they also are limited in capacity.
These portable hard drives can be found as small as 100 GB
and as large as 320 GB in size. The larger non-portable
external hard drives come in sizes as big as several
terabytes in size. The first thing to think about once
looking for a new hard drive, is to consider whether or not
you want a portable hard drive. If you plan on doing a lot
of traveling, and would like to bring it a large capacity
hard drive with you when you are on the road, you might find
a USB powered portable hard drive the best device for you.
Others, simply like their small size simple connectivity,
and lack of an AC adapter and will lean towards these types
of hard drives as well. If you really need a lot of room to
store many large sized files such as expansive music and
movie collections, you may opt for the larger sized external
hard drives that are not portable.
Western Digital Hard Drives
Western digital is
a hard drive manufacturing company with an excellent
reputation for their external and internal hard drives.
The Western Digital passport line of hard drives is the
portable USB powered hard drive that consistently ranks in
high customer satisfaction ratings. We have been using
our Western Digital 120 GB Passport portable hard drive for
several years now and have found it extremely reliable and
not much bigger than a pack of playing cards - and powered
by its own USB-port. Western
Digital also offers the "My Book" series of high-capacity
external hard drives that have achieved similar reliability
and customer satisfaction ratings. These drives come
in several categories including the home version, the
essential version, the office version, the world version, and
more. For the most robust data protection, consider
the "My Book Mirror Edition" hard drives by Western Digital
which offer several
advanced configurations including RAID redundant backup
configuration.
The RAID 0 configuration offers data
striping redundancy which spreads out your data across two
separate volumes of hard drives. For the most
redundant protection, we recommend the RAID 1 configuration
which offers
data mirroring across two identical hard drives. The
Mirror Edition drives come with two identically sized hard
drives -- when you backup your data, your data is written to
one of the two hard drives, then the data is replicated to
the second hard drive (instantly). This gives you
double data protection all in one box and all done instantly
with the included backup software. The best part about
this is even if one of your backup drives experiences
complete failure, the second drive allows you full recovery. Prices for external hard
drives are very competitive and by searching online you can
often find a very reasonable price as these hard drives are
consistently on sale from local or Internet electronics
vendors.
One bit of advice, do NOT assume that
Microsoft Vista's automatic "Defrag Lite" will do a good job
on a Western Digitals large hard drives (500GB and larger).
I started to experience playback problems with recorded
video and discovered that the drive was severely fragmented,
even with Vista set to defrag it once a week. There's no
easy way to analyze the drive for fragmentation with Vista
defrag's dumbed-down user interface. It would be great
if Western Digital included a defragmentation utility in its
Drive Manager or Diagnostics Tool -- but it doesn't.
However, there is freeware out there (Auslogics or JKDefrag)
that will do a thorough job and will actually show you what
it's doing. So defrag this drive thoroughly and often,
especially if you copy, move, delete and convert a lot of
large video files.
Backup Solutions
Once you have selected the hard drive and
purchased it, it is now time to implement a viable backup
solution. The first step in creating a backup plan, is
identifying which are the most important files on your
computer. These files are the ones that you absolutely
cannot do without an are fearful of losing. Such files may
be important financial and legal documents, work or school
related documents, or even family digital photos that are on
your hard drive. Additionally, many users store e-mail
files and folders or backups on their computer hard drive
and would like to back them up periodically as well.
Lastly, one might consider backing up a music collection
video collection home videos or other multimedia files as
well, especially if the only copy resides on your PC
hard drive.
Check out our article on
how to create a backup solution.
Backup
Software
Memeo’s AutoBackup software ships with many hard drives,
(a trial version is shpped with Western Digital drives). After plugging in the unit
for the first time, the Windows AutoRun dialog box will pop
up asking you if you’d like to install the software. Once
that’s taken care of, it’s simply a matter of selecting what
you’d like to back up and where the backups should be
stored. That’s basically all there is to it, there’s not
even a schedule window. You can backup data sets, or
subsets, in multiple places, including the Internet, yet
manage them from one interface.
Acronis
True Image Home 2009 takes backup and disaster recovery to
an entirely new level of security and reliability.
While file-based backups are great for choosing only a few
specific files and folders to protect, Image-based backups
have the ability to take snapshot of your ENTIRE computer --
including ALL your programs AND the Operating System.
Check out the bast deals on Western Digital Hard Drives
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