recommendations for portable hard drive
 

I want to purchase a portable hard drive to back up my and my wife's laptops. I know that these don't offer 100% security, since they can fail. My work laptop gets backed up at the server at work, but I won't be here forever, and did want some other form of back-up.

I want at least 500gb of storage space, and prefer the portable format. In addition, my wife only as USB 2.0 connectivity, but I might be upgrading my notebook in the next year, in time for usb 3.0?? I know there are one or two portable drives offering that sort of connectivity -- should I bother right now?

The most important considerations are a) reliability and b) ease of use -- especially since there will be two computers. If any come with a card-reader (SD) slot, to back-up photos/videos directly, even better, but not a big issue.

thanks,

tb

Western Digital My Passport
 

My wife got me a Western Digital My Passport drive last year and I love it. I'm partial to Western Digital drives since they haven't failed me yet either in my desktops or my portable drive. The 1 TB versions are pretty cheap these days and they use USB 2.0. I haven't seen any that use USB 3.0 yet.

If you want encryption, I recommend using TrueCrypt which is a software program that can encrypt only part of your drive or the whole thing. Good luck!

I purchased a Seagate FreeAgent Go a couple of years ago. The only thing I didn't like about it was the "sync" software that came with it; it seemed to want to replace files in folders after I had deleted them. I think it was really meant to be a way to take a copy of your PC with you and use it with another machine, which was not what I needed. I just wiped it's hard drive and used Lenovo's backup utility instead.

It's now been replaced with a FreeAgent Desk that does what I want it to do as far as backing up, but if I needed a portable solution, I would consider the current version with the newer software.

Cnet review here.

Portable 640gb drives are usually a fairly hefty premium over 500gb drives; I'd recommend sticking to 500gb, if you need portable.

Not for general backup use; the speed improvement will be marginal, and with the extra cost right now ($125-140 for 500GB rather than $70-80 for 500GB) you will be able to buy another one with USB3 later for close to or the same total cost.

Sticking to the known drive manufacturers (Seagate, Hitachi, Western Digital) is probably best, then, since it's impossible to know which drive manufacturer the other portable-drive+case manufacturers are actually using.

Which sense of "ease of use?"

Hardware-wise, you take the USB cord (sometimes split to two connectors on portable) and plug it.

Software-wise, what the drives come with is almost always crud, and they tend to come badly formatted - what you want to do in pretty much every case is reformat the drive to NTFS as soon as you get it home.

If you're running Windows 7, the built-in backup software isn't horrible, and in general beats most of the included freebies. I do over-the-network backups to a home server, so I'm not as up on open-source backup software for local disk use, but odds are there is some good stuff out there.

If you need a "photo vault" drive for backing up SD cards from cameras, you'll probably want to restrict it to that use (or at least casual data transfers, not serious backups) - they require you keep their software and disk format for the photo backup to work. Mixing that with a general-purpose external backup drive is bad juju.

Another vote for WD My Passport. I have owned several and they've been great. I just got an ad in the mail for $30 off the 750GB version, making it $89...very good deal for that model. Costco usually sends the ads about a week before they're valid so it might not start right away but if you have a membership I'd recommend the Passports.

I got an Astone ISO Gear 288 with 500GB Western Digital drive inside and it conked out after a few months. Good thing it was still under warranty and they replaced it. The bad news is, all my files are gone. Good thing, some of it was still in my home PC.

Thanks for the advice all. I appreciate that any drive may fail, and I should stick to a big name: but it seems that they are much of a muchness after that..?


OK, you've already lost me. For information: I'm running vista, my wife has a netbook with windows 7 starter edition. Is the general advice that I should reformat the drive before using?

Will the backup software for our OSs (and that they are two different ones) cause issues for backing stuff up?

I want to back everything up, but part of that will include photos and video. Not sure why it's a bad idea to back these up on the same drive as everything else.

Help for this poor ignoramus appreciated, as usual.

tb

I'd go for 2.5" rather than 3.5" since the latter usually has some sort of external power supply involved.

Really, two choices.

First, buy your own HDD and external case. That way, you have ultimate flexibility to upgrade the case to USB3.0, if you want.

Second, buy a "branded" unit. Nothing wrong with that and overall costs are sometimes lower than buying via the 1st method but, of course, flexibility is limited. Also, if you do go this route, make sure you can disable the bundled software - since they all come with auto-running bundled software. :mad:

That's my opinion, yes. (The alternative, as noted by Braindrain, of going with a case and separate drive is fine too, in which case I'd avoid the 2nd-tied drive manufacturers and stick to the 3 big names, but the case can be pretty much from anyone. Also, for external USB, 7200RPM is not worth paying extra for.)

There are at least two of us who've said so. Others' opinions may vary.

No problem at all mixing the two.

Vista and Windows 7 are quite similar in that respect. Note that there are actually two kinds of backups supported - creating a full "System Image" and backing up your files. In the first case, the system image will play nicely with multiple Vista/Windows 7 machines, and all the images will go in a hidden directory under "System Volume Information".

In the backup-by-file case, you just set up the scheduled backups to each go to a different folder.

While it takes up more space, there's a good bit of merit to doing both kinds of backups.

Backing those up via the computer does not need to go on a separate drive. Let me try to restate what I tried to say earlier -

For the drives that do backups directly from the SD card to the drive without any PC involved (something like this: http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Foci-P.../ref=pd_cp_p_1 ) requires that the disk inside be formatted in a way that makes sense to the very primitive computer inside the device itself. This is very limiting for a general backup device, and these are best kept as a specialized device for people who take a lot of pictures.

If you're just going from card-to-disk via an actual general-purpose computer, as long as both are intelligible formats for the computer, it's no problem.

Thats what I do. Its $6 for the case, $1 for the USB cord and $50 for the HDD. I use the same type of HDD in the my computers, free copy programs so if the computers HDD fails I just pop in backup one and I am online within 2 minutes.

MisterNice

have you looked at the backup in the cloud solutions (live mesh, skydrive, carbonite, jungledisk via S3). Failure becomes less of an issue, space becomes less of an issue, and redundancy is less of an issue.

Sure, costs a little more, but you get more for it, plus the backups of the backup.

If you can afford it, get two drives and rotate regular backups. Last drives I bought were Seagate 1.5 TB drives ($110 each at Costco), and I've got a pair of older WD 500 MB drives. The larger drives allow me to keep two backups (I rotate them) of my desktop and laptop computer.

My experiences with portable (USB powered) drives is decidedly poor.

High failure rates, and the "two USB cords" someone else mentioned may indeed be required to power the device from some underpowered USB ports.

Re: reformatting. Got an external drive (not portable, power supply needed), Iomega 1TB eGo or some such, and it came with a funky file system I'd never seen before, and couldn't be used with XP. So, yup, had to reformat.

Bottom line: DON'T rely on a portable disk for safe backups of critical files.

Depending on how you expect the drive to be treated, you might want to go with a slightly-ruggedized drive such as LaCie's. You can't drive a bus over them, but they're shock-mounted to survive a fall from 2.2 meters (7 feet). To me, that's a feature worth having.

Absolutely get two. Or turn this around: Ask yourself "was saving $100 (or $70 build it yourself) worth now all my data is missing or corrupted?"...

I use online backup (Carbonite) and 2 external Maxtor USB drives. Oh and a second internal drive :)