Computer backup options - USB

[Escudo]

Looking for a little wisdom on the computer front fellas,

I was thinking of getting a usb hard drive to attach to my new computer to back up pictures, music etc....

Do you think I can get away with using one of those little flash drives that plug into the usb slot. No power required. Is this a safe medium for backup storage?

I don't think I really need some 500gb second hard drive, which I think will need a power supply.

What do you use for backup?

Is there away I can make use of an old hard drive, some sort of way to directly attach this via usb without power?

Hope someone has got an idea. I like usb it seems easy and works.

Cheers, Tony

 

[superunknown]

I use an 8gb usb flash drive for back-ups etc, they work great

You can buy a caddy for a standard hard drive. Have a look on ebuyer or similar.

 

[motownmartin]

Have a look at this http://www.amazon.co.uk/Navigator-Enclo ... B000RAFFEY I had a similar one for my old laptop hard drive.

 

[Davon]

I sometimes use the 5gb of backup space that came included with my anti-virus package from Bullguard.
Davon

 

[wizer]

I have had more solid state (SD, etc) memory devices go wrong on me then hdd's over the years.

For xmas I bought my Dad a Western Digital external hard drive for backing up his personal files, pics, etc. He uses it on his, his partners and his partners daughter's laptop and the bundled software handles it effortlessly.

We supply them at work so I have had a lot of time to play with them. I really think this is the best backup solution for the general home and small business user.

 

[Escudo]

Thanks fellas.

The caddy idea looks great as I have loads of old hard drives lying around, however these all seem to need another power supply which is a wrench. Another fan running and more noise.

I like the idea of getting a big usb flash stick say, 16gb, like nola. I can always throw my files on my office machine from time to time using this highly portable device. This would act as another location for data and will be backed up again on tape at the office.

Keep the ideas coming. Cheers, Tony

 

[Escudo]

Whiz can you get one of those devices which does not require a seperate power supply or have a fan?

 

[motownmartin]

Tony, my caddy does not need an extra power supply it gets the power via the USB, have a look around.

 

[wizer]

The smaller 2.5" ones do not need a separate power supply. I have one plugged in to my laptop right now.

 

[Escudo]

Arghhh ..............now I have broken this machine.

But I may have inadvertently worked out away to engineer myself the title master cabinet maker.

 

[DaveL]

But I may have inadvertently worked out away to engineer myself the title master cabinet maker.

Not just yet. :roll:

 

[Escudo]

Sorry Dave (knew you were watching )

Yes, the 2.5" drive. I will see what I can find lying around in laptop death row at the office.

Thanks for the advice.

 

[matt]

My backup solution is probably overkill but I'll mention it anyway, just in case you're using more than one PC/device on a network that needs backing up...

I took an old PC, loaded it with hard drives, and installed a free program called FreeNAS. The NAS bit stands for Network Attached Storage. The point being that it's connected to the network hub and is accessible as a drive to any device that also connects to the network. In my case that includes 2 laptops, a web server, mobile phones, and the list goes on.

You can buy both USB connected and network connected storage devices (i.e. you don't have to choose between USB or build your own - I just chose to make my own cos I had the PC kicking about and some large hard drives).

 

[Michael7]

I have a caddy for a laptop drive which doesnt need a power supply. I had the PC running all night but forgot to switch off the caddy and since the caddy has no fan the drive inside got damaged by overheating.

 

[wizer]

I have a caddy for a laptop drive which doesnt need a power supply. I had the PC running all night but forgot to switch off the caddy and since the caddy has no fan the drive inside got damaged by overheating.

This doesn't happen with the Western Digital 'of the shelf' systems

 

[bullseye]

I have loads of old hard drives lying around

Hmm sounds bad news to me using an old drive that you have just lying around. But there again it depends what you data is actually worth.

How about using DVd's if you don't have to much data. Most home PC's come with a DVD writer and blanks are only pence. :wink:

 

[kityuser]

I have had more solid state (SD, etc) memory devices go wrong on me then hdd's over the years.

For xmas I bought my Dad a Western Digital external hard drive for backing up his personal files, pics, etc. He uses it on his, his partners and his partners daughter's laptop and the bundled software handles it effortlessly.

We supply them at work so I have had a lot of time to play with them. I really think this is the best backup solution for the general home and small business user.

little word of caution, its obviously notorious on the web that whenever somebody "swears by" a hard disk manufacturer there are 10 others who have had nothing but bad experience.

I have had nothing but trouble with WD external hardisks, either crashed disks or chipsets that go bad. My current "mybook" has a 3 inch fan strapped to the top of if because the passive cooling is insufficient and cooks the usb/FW chipset. Not good when the device is supposed to be used for backups!!!

just to add another cook to the broth, my 2 cents are Iccy box external enclosures with WD SE (server edition) caviar disks. I upgrade the flash of the enclosure to a better version and have had zero problems for the past 3 years (some of them get flogged constantly for things like dvd rendering and video transcoding).

a word of note about some of the smaller enclosure disks, they are obviously based on laptop disks which are particularly slow. A mate of mine had an interesting problem, one of these "tiny" laptop based external disks kept failing and it turned out that the "anti shock" mechanism in the laptop drive was kicking in when the fan in his PC was starting or stopping, must have been the wrong resonance frequency and enough energy was transfered to trip the protection in the HD

Steve

 

[Gower]

I have a Lacie 250GB USB drive that I've had for some years. It was fairly inexpensive at the time, about £65 from Staples, and I back up weekly using Windows Backup. I've used it several times to backup data for friends & family before restoring data onto new computers,hard discs WHY. Very flexible, cheap and reliable.
Cheers,
Jim