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Looking for something to back up stuff on my laptop. Mostly around 50G of photos.
Something easy to use, not hugely expensive and above all reliable. In fact I want more than one as I want to be doubly, or even trebly, cautious. Photos are the one thing I'd hate to lose.
Also looking at cloud storage, but that's a separate issue.
A one or two (or maybe even three) terabyte USB external hard drive should be pretty easy to pick up in somewhere like Maplin for around a hundred quid. I know you said 50 gigabytes but you might as well get as much space as you can... Future-proofing and all that.
I back all my pictures up to my external hard drive, as well as burning pictures to two DVDs or CDs (depending on space requirements).
Oh, and get MS Sync Toy (free) to do the backup for you!
A one or two (or maybe even three) terabyte USB external hard drive should be pretty easy to pick up in somewhere like Maplin for around a hundred quid.
Cheers, but to be honest I'd rather have two or more at half the price. My photos in total come to 30G, and other stuff is just Word and Excel documents that take up nothing at all. Even 50G allows plenty room for expansion.
And what I want is them backed up to several (thinking about it maybe five or six) different places, some of which will be stored at other people's houses in case of fire or something.
Would have to suggest a couple of 64G flash drives- prob cost less than £50
There's one on Amazon's 'today only' at the moment.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B008A1C0CW
1Tb for sub-£70.
TBH if it were me, I'd just get an adapter and a bunch of naked drives.
www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=usb+sata
my advice dont buy seagate. to many failures. wd (western digital) never had a problem
TBH if it were me, I'd just get an adapter and a bunch of naked drives.
At the risk of sounding thick, what's the difference?
It's cheaper, generally.
Second dropoff's suggestion - from the volume of data you've mentioned a few solid state flash drives would be my choice - either USB sticks or some other style of memory card (SDHC or Compact Flash) - you should be able to get this for about 50p per Gb for good branded devices - Sandisk, Lexar, Samsung or Kingston.
+! for Western Digital - I've got something like this one from [url= http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital-Elements-500GB-Portable/dp/B005A97A86/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1348690585&sr=8-1 ]Amazon hdd[/url] - powered off the USB port so no extra cables making it nice and portable. For £50 can't really go wrong (2tb is only £80...). Not stunning speeds but for backups that's not really an issue.
Also looking at cloud storage, but that's a separate issue.
Yes, that gets quite expensive very quickly for larger capacity. Sign yourself up for DropBox or MS Skydrive and stick your most favouritist 5 GB of photos up there for free (Skydrive might be 7GB).
Are USB sticks and the like not meant to more be for temporary storage (I'm happy to be wrong here....my knowledge is very limited)? Will they still be fine in 10 or 20 years?
How long does data keep on unused hard drives?
How long does data keep on anything?
I'm considering using this for cloudy backup.
[url= http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/#pricing ]Glacier[/url]
Plenty of free clients. Might be a bit geeky though, and not as slick as mozy et all.
So what is the best way of keeping photos for 10, 20 or 30 years?
Picture books?
EDIT: Actually - archival grade DVDs.
Cheers for all the replies guys. Appreciated.
http://www.ewlink.co.uk/lexar-echo-mx-usb-20-flash-drive---128-gb-black--usb-type-a-malefemale-extension-lead---2-metre-6256-p.asp
Getting one of these to put all my music on, partly as a back-up, partly to use in the car; my DAB has a USB port for an iPod or FlashDrive, and this, with an extension lead is just the jobbie. I can leave it in the little cubby-hole under the radio and not worry about it being there.
It would fit the bill for you, I think, or else just buy three or four 32Gb SD or CF cards and copy to those. When I fill an SD card now I just keep it and buy new blank ones, three 8Gb Sandisk ones recently cost around sixteen quid.
my advice dont buy seagate. to many failures. wd (western digital) never had a problem
And my experience is that seagate are great. The last 6 I've bought have been seagate free agent drives and they are brilliant.
Also, I'm sure you've thought of this, but make sure you don't end up just copying your photos to the disk or you will. O longer have a backup. In the end I like to have two external drives which I alternate for a bit of redundancy as I don't want to lose the photos either
I'm with the WD brigade; several seagate devices failed and have plenty of WD's which are working wonderfully.
I too have had a long line of Seagate failures (all 1TB external disks), though a few years ago they were supposed to be the best for SATA drives.
Samsung seemed to be flavour of the month a while back - try them?
wd (western digital) never had a problem
just note if it comes with and you use 'WD Sync' and your computer dies youll struggle to retrieve your data from the WD drive as WD appears to encrypt it. Had this problem recently and a far more 'puter savvy mate managed to recover it all and 'cracked' the drive to just work an an external disc but from searching the tinterweb its caught a few people out.