[Closed] external hard drives

I'm afraid I'm no help in recommending an external drive, but get a back up ASAP....

I bought the external hard drive, never got round to it, and now have potentially lost all my photos of my kids from birth to now (5 years) as the laptop hard drive died unexpectedly.

Working, unused hard drive sat on shelf giving me "I told you so" looks now, as I play on the iPad looking up data recovery services for the borked laptop drive.

I have a nasty feeling the wife is taking it too well, if they can't be recovered I think I may be in for some [s]well desrved[/s] $hit...

PS A friend has belatedly recommended Spideroak cloud storage... Not related to me or him, but he's a true computer geek, so might be ok.

He advises it as a belt and braces thing with an external drive back up too.

Have a look at Synology
Lost of people do home NAS (network attached storage) but they do the best and easiest to use and set up.
With great apps for mobile devices

Better to have a central storage and more devices can access and store to them

looking up data recovery services for the borked laptop drive.

Probably worth putting it in a cheap enclosure first and seeing if the files can be read.

Ouch. Quite a lot can be done to recover data depending on what and how it's broken. You could try sticking it in an external caddy. Though if you don't know what you're doing just don't touch it again and take it to someone who does!

Loads of cloud backup solutions out there now. Just make sure you understand what you're getting and the difference between proper versioned backups and just a cloud copy. Same if you decide to backup to an external drive.

I bought a SH Drobo off Fleabay about five years ago. It's the best and worst tech toy I ever bought. Plugged it in, took five minutes to set up and since then, err, it's just worked. Not quick but reasonably quiet. When it gets full I just shove a new drive in and, err, it just works. Very very boring but that's good really.

ouch to the 2nd poster.

not much to choose between them really. USB3 if you have it! Don't forget your backup copy is just as fragile as your source though!

Think about coupling it with another strategy - maybe you can plug a USB disk into your router already (the NAS angle). Netgear and DLink even have a backup widget.

Next step is a 321 stratgegy. 3 copies: 2 here, 1 there. 'There' can be google, Amazon or somewhere cloud.

Sync (dropbox,Gdrive etc.) is useful but don't forget corruptions/deletes are also sync'd - meaning it's not a reliable recovery in all cases..

Tools like CLoudberry or Crashplan can manage a real 321 backup for you. CLoudberry is nice b/c it let's you encrypt your backup whoever you send it to (there is an opensource option somewhere as well) - stops Google or whoever slurping your data (if that bothers you)..

I think it's important to automate stuff like this - 2nd poster is the case in point (been there myself! hope you can recover them - I did mine with a caddy and the freezer - but do your own reasearch first!)

hmm that reminds me I have at least 1 disk not copied somewhere..

ps Ebuyer have a 500GB hybrid drive for 42.99 today. Add a USB3 caddy and you should get fastish transfers.. http://www.ebuyer.com/582444-toshiba-500gb-solid-state-hybrid-drive-sshd-mq01abf050h

bonchance +1

My mac runs an automated smart backup to the Drobo at 03:30 every Saturday. If I had to think about it then it would never happen.

I occasionally check to see if it ran but, yep, it always does. Really boring but really reassuring.

In the time honoured recommend what you own fashion: Promise Smartstor for me.

I bought the external hard drive, never got round to it, and now have potentially lost all my photos of my kids from birth to now (5 years) as the laptop hard drive died unexpectedly.

Try hooking the dead drive up to a Linux box - boot the laptop into Linux if necessary. I got most of the info from a dead drive that way when Windows wouldn't even see it.

12bn? 😯 12000000000000 photographs ?

= 24000000000000 mb
= 24000000 tb
= 24000 pb !

that's some pc you have there, more images than flickr! 🙂

I bought the external hard drive, never got round to it, and now have potentially lost all my photos of my kids from birth to now (5 years) as the laptop hard drive died unexpectedly.

Back up, back up, back up!

Terrible thing for you if you can't get them back but luckily, it's never too late to recreate family photo favorites...

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Cloud storage is good but it depends on your connection to an extent. I have thousands of photos and slow broadband so use a couple of Samsung external drives which I keep in different places.

It's hard to get in the habit of regular backups but worth it.

My tactic has been to randomly save photos all over place, discs a multitude of hard drives and now Google drive. So far so good.

Periodically I'll choose a few favourite photos and add them to a good old fashion photo album which means they even get looked at!

Dropbox for me - can upload photos from my mobile which are then syc'd with my laptop the next time I turn it on.

I realy should get an external HD as a 'third' back up.

I'd just see what MyMemory have in your price range..

looking up data recovery services for the borked laptop drive.

I've used CBL Data Recovery a few times for work computers over the years. Nice people who will check your hard drive and let you know how much it will cost to recover your data and what they will recover. If you decide not to go ahead they just return your drive to you at no charge. At least that was the case last time I used them.

p.s. I'm not associated with them in any way. I'm just a happy customer.

Bear in mind if you have regular ADSL then large cloud backups will take a very long time for the initial sync as you're going the "wrong" way up an asynchronous connection. I'd want fibre to consider cloud as a serious solution personally.

Sync (dropbox,Gdrive etc.) is useful but don't forget corruptions/deletes are also sync'd - meaning it's not a reliable recovery in all cases..

Dropbox has a "roll-back" feature, so that you can recover deleted files and even previous versions of synced files. Used it successfully after my other half accidentally hit "delete" on the entire business folder while accessing it over the network. Top-tip - network drive deletes don't go into the Recycle Bin they are GONE!