for backing up photos.
I'd like something that's quite robust as well - can you get fire proof?
Obviously nothing ridiculously expensive, in the region of £150?
What size of storage?
How do you want to connect it? USB? Firewire? Esata? Do you want it to run straight off the computer or are you ok with a 3 point power lead?
Portable or not?
Lacie rugged hds are great if you need to take them anywhere, I use the regular lacie neil poulton designed one and it works fine aswell.
I know very little in this area!
Storage size, I think my laptop is 250gb and pc 500gb so something in that region maybe 1tb?
It would be nice if I could get it plugged in somewhere away from home (like work or parents) and just link to it over the net to drop the pictures there. That way if our house was robbed/fire the photos would be ok. Is that possible? If not it will have to be portablish so I can move it between home & work to keep 2 stores.
I'll google Lacie thanks
transcend do a military ruggedized one too.
supposed to be faster than most (over USB) and relatively cheap.
I did a fair bit of research and bought that one. I tend to put my possessions through an accelerated wear programme, so I'm sure the ruggedizing will come in handy at some point!
this one:[url= http://www.amazon.co.uk/Transcend-TS500GSJ25M-Trans-500GB-StoreJet2-5in/dp/B001HAMNSY/ref=pd_cp_ce_1 ]http://www.amazon.co.uk/Transcend-TS500GSJ25M-Trans-500GB-StoreJet2-5in/dp/B001HAMNSY/ref=pd_cp_ce_1[/url]
http://www.dabs.com/products/western-digital-1tb-my-book-elite-usb2-65W9.html
I use millions of these, never been let down yet.
As far as I'm aware, they all just appear in My Computer as another drive once you plug them into any PC/laptop. Some have better compatibility with Mac than others, so if you kn ow you might be plugging it in to one of them, check that out when you're doing your looking.
It would be nice if I could get it plugged in somewhere away from home (like work or parents) and just link to it over the net to drop the pictures there. That way if our house was robbed/fire the photos would be ok. Is that possible? If not it will have to be portablish so I can move it between home & work to keep 2 stores.
Not much point the transfer over the net would take ages for any large amount of data. Why not just put all your photos on Flikr?
It would be nice if I could get it plugged in somewhere away from home (like work or parents) and just link to it over the net to drop the pictures there.
[url= https://www.dropbox.com/ ]Dropbox[/url] is great for storing online and accessing from any machine (PC or Mac) with a DB login. Works for me.
I thought about using a site like flickr but I wasn't sure how secure/backed up they are plus I think you have to pay for some of them. I thought it would be safer if I had my own seperate HD.
Not so fussed about the time taken to sync. Yes it will be along time initially (I'd do it by plugging it in direct) but after that it would be nice to do it over the network. I only take a few hundred photos a month quite happy to leave it running in the background.
The only fireproof hard drive is one that isn't in a building thats on fire.
If you want it accessible over the net then I would suggest a QNAP NAS box. I have the QNAP219p with 2 drives and a built in print server, but you can get cheaper:
[url= http://www.scan.co.uk/Shop/Computer-Hardware/All/Networking/Network-Attached-Storage-%28Without-Hard-Drive%29 ]NAS boxes from Scan[/url]