External drive for archiving

It is important to have an external drive for archiving. That is one protection when the laptop is hit by a damaging virus. I have checked the market for a 2 terabyte hard drive and it's surprisingly expensive, much cheaper to buy 2 units of 1 terabyte each. But, of course, it's inconvenient to manage 2 hard drives. However, a colleagues tells me that the hard drive can also collapse so if you have 2 separate units then it is safer.

Now I'm having a dilemma.

 

I think 1 TB storage is a lot of storage. In my 1 TB disk, I have over 200 movies and over 2000 music and still I have space for 150 GB photos. If you are too concerned about loss of data, you can do cloud storage. You can for free as well as paid.

 

If you can afford to get a 2TB drive and you're going to keep it in really good conditions with minimal wear and not have to move it around or bump it at all (and you have a surge protector to make sure a brown out or power issue doesn't destroy data), then you should be ok with a 2TB drive.

If the data on the drive is very important or irreplaceable, then yes you should get a quantity of (2) 1 terabyte drives for now, even if it will be slightly more expensive to upgrade from later. Whenever you distribute your data, you double your chances of preserving it for every new copy you make of it. The chances of 1 drive going out are cut by half the moment you duplicate the data.

Ideally, you'd want to use compression on data that is replaceable, while storing your most important data that cannot be replaced as uncompressed on each drive. The reason for this is because if there is an error that occurs on the drive where compression data is stored to represent a smaller version of important data that cannot be replaced, it can be more difficult or in some cases impossible to retrieve that data again and restore the file contents to what it was before to correctly decompress it again and extract the original information from the archive. There are some utilities that can help repair parts of damaged archives if this happens, but even those can only retrieve portions of data from blocks they are able to repair.

I am very much a compression enthusiast, but I still advise that if you are to use it, make sure there are multiple copies of what you compress if it is important, and if you need safety of retrieval more than space, store anything irreplaceable as uncompressed on both drives to guarantee recovery and that it can be read back correctly later with or without errors.

As for any normal data that you can download again or get easily, like a movie or mp3 song, you should definitely compress those to save space on each drive so that you can get the most out of it. If anything happens to a part of a drive with a bad sector and the data stored on it was common or easily downloaded again from your favorite web site (just more convenient to have in storage), then you can download that again and not have to worry about losing the irreplaceable data.

Also, you may want to make a backup copy of very important data on the same drive if it is small. You can multiply your chances by 4x or more for recovery and preservation of data if you keep duplicates. Even if one drive went out suddenly and the other drive developed bad sectors to where the irreplaceable data could not be recovered in a certain area of the drive, you may still be ok because you made another copy of it on the same drive that is still readable and can quickly save the important information from the backup copy to another external medium that is just large enough to hold the important data you need to save in a hurry.

As for cloud storage, I would only store the mp3 and movies or common data on there. They make many distributed copies of your information whenever you upload anything to them so that it is never lost, but there is no way of knowing which people have access to that information suddenly or what they may do with it without you being aware of it. For that reason, cloud storage should never, ever be used for any personal information and only everyday data that can be downloaded and shared intentionally from a web site.

If you upload any personal information to a cloud environment, you might as well be emailing a hacker attachments of your private information voluntarily. It's practically the same in principle, and will be stored forever somewhere without you knowing it even if you delete it from the cluster you're allowed to access to retrieve files later. Once you put it on the internet on a distributed server, it may exist forever...for anyone else to access as well as you.

 

Use this program to do a full system back it's called Aomei Backupper

http://www.freewarefiles.com/search.php?query=+Aomei+Backupper&B1.x=0&B1.y=0&boolean=exact

 

I'd suggest sticking to 1TB mainly because I've had a 2TB Seagate portable hard drive fail on me unexpectedly with no data recovery possibilities. But that's my personal experience.

The important thing here is to know that you have to do a lot of research before buying so you are sure you're buying a high quality product that wont fail on you. Read reviews, watch YouTube videos, see what the differences are between different models. All of these actions help you get a better understanding of what you're buying and will be beneficial in the long run.

 

I bought a external HD last year, so far so good. As long as you keep your HD safe, don't drop it or anything like that, you will not lose a thing

 

I think you also should be extra cautious with your external drive. Data loss is a common issue with such device. You will have backup your device with another device.

 

That's also the opinion of most of my colleagues - a bigger capacity is convenient since you are handling only 1 device but when it breaks down, you lose everything. However, that bigger disk capacity is intended for archiving only. That means I have another disk for the backup. As what @IBMPC8088 said, the disk may not be worn out since it is not much used (only for archiving) so the wear and tear is not normal. I may settle for a 2TB but I will wait for the stores to have a sale. A Seagate is my current prospect.

 

I have a Seagate 1TB portable hard drive for two years now to keep all my data on it, and I try to be very careful in handling it. When it is not in use, I remove the cable just to keep it from bumping or moving with other things.

Have you check eBay for the price of the 2TB or just do a search to see where you can get it for less?

 

When I was in college (10 years ago) a 100 GB external hard drive was considered large. From what I am reading on this forum is that 1TB is the new standard. That is CRAZY! has anyone ever filled a 1TB hard drive?

 

It's not that hard to do, programs are becoming bigger and bigger. Not only that but people back up more stuff then they did in the past.

 

I also think that having two 1TB drive rather than a single 2TB drive will be more beneficial. Hard drives or mechanical drives are always prone to damage. They have a limited lifespan. They ran be damaged in 1day or 10 years but surely they will one day.
I prefer the Western Digital passport drives of 1TB each. They are economical and are much more secured than seagate, at least telling that from my experience.

 

It is kind of weird for me when I think about how my use of external hard drives has changed. They started out really expensive and back when files were larger and just seemed to take up more space, and so it was more about capacity. Now, since they are cheaper and I do not have that many files, they are there more as organizational tools, which I can use all the help that I can get there. They are great to have, though.

 

For many years I relied on the antivirus and malware program.I though I have protected my data well.hen one day my system was infected with virus. This happens when the license of my antivirus expired and I had not renewed the antivirus or installed another program, I learned a lesson, I have to have external drive for archiving. Now I have 1 TB disk.

 

Always back ups of your data, I have gone through that once or twice but fortunately, I had backed up the more important stuff so it wasn't too bad. If I hadn't I would have been in real trouble.

 

Some years back, I attended a seminar for hardware as required by our office. One of the speakers said that the hard drive has a life of 2 years only. And after 2 years, the drive should be accessed once in a while otherwise it may lock itself and cannot be accessed anymore. I don't know if he was joking but he seemed serious.

In another thread, the SSD got me interested because it has no moving parts. It is has no mechanical movement so I guess it has a longer lifespan.