Portable external hardrives

I use a desktop at home and (sync) backup (whenever I'm doing editing) to a 2nd internal HDD. Same deal with the laptop. I do a weekly (sync) backup for both to a 2TB WD USB-3 drive which I keep at work.

This way I have my original files, a local backup on the 2nd HDD and weekly backup offsite.

BTW I recently changed laptops and the one I inherited didn't have a 2nd HDD. I bought a optical drive caddy (ebay) and 500GB, 2.5" drive (Umart)for a total of $80. A cheap solution I think to getting piece of mind.

Dick smith have some reasonably priced external drives - Seagate 500g for $79 or upgrade to a 1 terabyte for $99. They are powered off the usb port and are usb 3 which is backwards compatible with previous versions. That way if you end up upgrading your laptop you can take advantage of the faster transfer speeds. As an aside you should try to keep around 20% of your hard drive as 'free space' for optimum performance (your primary drive with the OS on it that is). I think Big W has Western Digital drives for $89 for 500 gig too. Hope that helps! Good luck p.s. you should try to have 2 backups of everything you value so maybe grab 2 drives. Try to keep at least one backup off site - eg I have a backup drive that lives in the car so if the house burns down while I am away at least I have a backup!

Officeworks have seagate 2TB HDD for around $100, I have 3 and they haven't failed yet

Marty I'm only using 212gb of my 500gb hard drive on my laptop....I dont think its my drive thats the issue...

I wonder whether its my Ram thats the issue...of maybe my motherboaard is going to give up...im not computer nut but the tell tale signs of everything slowing down taking longer to load makes me sure im on borrowed time.

What OS do you have and when was the last reformat/reinstall?

Windows 7

I have not reformatted or reinstalled....because I haven't done any backups (I also worry about buggering it up doing things like a reformat of the drive etc)

I have 8x Seagate Expansion Desktop 3TB HDDs that I use for work. Paid <$120 ea. No failures yet...

I'm pretty sure the external I have here from my other computer 500g (which is full) is a seagate its about 6years old now but it didn't get turned on that often that's why I wasn't judging seagates reliability on my own experience

Because saying its never failed is not really a fair observation considering its minimal use :D

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Originally Posted by Blknight.aus

that was my sisters logic too.....

IMHO if you have a home network you are better off getting something along the lines of the mybook live that plugs into your network and you dont need to move it around very often.

about 1/3 of the failed external drives I get to see are from the USB connector getting damaged.

the rest are usually failed hard drive boards or head drivers.

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Dave I just looked at the mybook live

I like the features it has I might look at getting one if these as the 1T are not to expensive might even see if I can push to 2T

I like the remote access feature it has. Then I could get a smaller external to use just for a second back up of my raw files

Going back to the symptoms is your virus software up to date and have you done a full scan? Plus a defrag of the drive ?
Regardless of the above get a backup device,

I got a 3 tb sea gate, very happy and my movie library is growing rapidly.
Regards
Andrew