So my computer died yesterday, and now I feel like an idiot for not having my important files backed up all along. One of my "computer" friends is going to hook up mine as a secondary drive so I can fish out the information tonight. So I was wondering if y'all had any suggestions as to the best bang for my buck for an external when factoring in reliability (i have heard some horror stories about these drives, which are designed to SAFE HOLD information, fucking up), price point and convenience (firewire).Thanks!

9/13/2007 8:30:02 AM

i'm not answering your question directly, but
1) if your "computer died", you still can probably get the data off your old drive, unless it was the drive specifically that died
2) I would recommend using an online backup service like http://mozy.com maybe in addition to an external drive.

[Edited on September 13, 2007 at 8:39 AM. Reason : .]

9/13/2007 8:38:54 AM

Yeah, that what I meant man. He's hooking my drive up to his computer, because mine is stuck in this sort of feedback loop of: startup windows screen --> would you like to go into safemode, or last known working config screen (and no matter what i press it goes to) ----> blue screen of death for .5 seconds (not even enough time to take in what's happening!) -----> computer resets, and the circle of life continues. The most fucked up thing is that I haven't installed a program in about a month, or made any real configuration change to my computer.

9/13/2007 8:47:50 AM

Yeah, this should be easy to recover, given your symptoms, and as for external drives, none of them are inherently bad or any worse than an internal drive. All any external hard drive is is an off-the-shelf internal one in a USB/Firewire enclosure. Any should do.

9/13/2007 8:54:55 AM

Oh, I see. Then has anyone seen any good deals lately? That I can walk into a store and buy.

9/13/2007 8:58:09 AM

Only walk into a store to purchase computer hardware if you KNOW it's cheaper and/or you need it -right- away.

That said, check Newegg for deals and compare with your local store ... stores rip you off due to some sort of "convenience" fee (ok, I know that's not why, but it's my name for it).

http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=414&name=External-Hard-Drives

9/13/2007 9:41:37 AM

also fwiw, don't buy proprietary external hard drives, they are more expensive and typically harder to remove if you have to do any recovery of the backup drive, also i've never really seen a proprietary hard drive with that great of reviews.

your best bet is to buy a seagate retail hard drive w/ a good 5-year warranty, then buy an external enclosure for it. chances are it will come to the same price as an all-in-one solution and it'll last longer and be more convenient down the road if you choose to upgrade as well.

9/13/2007 12:02:20 PM

you can't beat hard backups of data (dvd r's, cdr's, tapes, disks, even flash drives)

I use my 200gb external for movies and full music albums then I have one DVD-RW i backup at the end of every semester with pics, docs, and good porn.

[Edited on September 13, 2007 at 12:08 PM. Reason : esad]

9/13/2007 12:08:07 PM

esata is like a sore dick... you just can't beat it

9/13/2007 12:16:06 PM

I upload most really important stuff like pics etc to my Gmail account. That way, there is really no way of losing them.

9/13/2007 12:37:37 PM

I have specific directories on my internal HDD (pictures, movies, music, important files, etc) backed up every night to my OpenFiler box which will soon have two drives in RAID 1 (this also allows me to share the data with any computer connected to my home LAN, or outside once I get a VPN set up). Then I have a small external with just my pictures (probably most important irreplaceable data I own) that I back up to every week or so. I also host my pictures off site just in case.

Get SyncBack. It's free and you can set up backup scheduling through Windows task maker to mirror your data as often as you want, or manually. It only copies changed data so you aren't duplicating files over and over on the backup medium.

I'm kind of paranoid about data loss though, so my set up might be overkill for some people. A good compromise is to get one of those one-touch externals and press the button every day or two.

9/13/2007 1:23:49 PM