External hard drives

[Bluefish]

My computer hd 590gb is full, how do you use the external ones? ie save it to the external / and delete it from the main computer? or keep it in two places? help :0)
Then any reccomendations for an external one would be good ta very muchly.

[djs]

I use external drives. They have all been fine apart from one (Maxtor) which almost died before I could save the stuff.
My Lacie and Western Digital have been 100%.

If you decide to go with one, I'd be tempted to copy (double up) all the important stuff at least for a while.
At a guess, I'd say there must be some stuff you could lose (in the event of if not being on the computer any more, but only the HDD) and some stuff you would regret losing... My family photos are also backed up on a few pen drives.

I have kind of cheated with my newest desktop. It's all backed up to a 1TB Western digital but I also put an old HDD in the main computer and use a program called "sync toy" (microsoft, free) to copy over stuff now and again.

[maccafan]

If you want to make it reasonably future proof, get a 2 TB NAS drive.

Connects to your router and you can access files from any device connected to the router including gaming consoles, smartphones and modern televisions.

[djs]

Apr 27, 2014 9:44:22 GMT maccafan said:

If you want to make it reasonably future proof, get a 2 TB NAS drive.

Connects to your router and you can access files from any device connected to the router including gaming consoles, smartphones and modern televisions.

Is the drive itself wi-fi? or do you sit the box next to your router (hard wired) and send it stuff? (schedule or manual).

Sounds like my kind of thing... NICE!

[chykensa]

Can't comment about NAS drives, but I have a couple of external plug'n'play drives (650Gb and 1Tb) which need nothing more than USB power, and I use these to keep my music (80Gb) and other important files. They work perfectly, and the transfer rate is fast enough for my demands. Newer USB 3.0 drives are now on the market, and a 1Tb drive goes for around £60 if you shop around.
I now increasingly use cloud storage too, which negates the use for physical capacity on any device. a Gb of storage is quite cheap to buy, and you can be almost guaranteed that it will be 100% reliable. Also look at Dropbox and other free areas too.
Between these two options, and possibly exploring the NAS route, you should be able to find something quite cheaply that will suit your needs.

[maccafan]

A proper NAS drive will be ethernet wired to the router. All clients connected to it can access the files depending on equipment capabilities.

It's like a mini network computer and many of them also support running bit torrent clients and webcasting which means you can access your files where ever you go but you need a good upload speed from your broadband.

It will also have a couple of USB ports so you can enhance storage by plugging in USB drives. You can buy them ready made ie.,with a hard drive or just the shell and put in one or two HDD's of your choice depending on the shell.

[fiddles]

Apr 27, 2014 9:26:27 GMT Bluefish said:

My computer hd 590gb is full, how do you use the external ones? ie save it to the external / and delete it from the main computer? or keep it in two places? help :0)
Then any reccomendations for an external one would be good ta very muchly.

If you just want to move files , just open two windows, one with files to move & the other destination drive, highlight files to move & right click highlighted files ( keep right mouse button held down) then move mouse into destination window & release mouse button you will then be given option to either copy here or move here, just left click your choice

[Bluefish]

Cheers guys, off to look at nas drives. Cloud storage is out as a main backup due to the cost, i do have a few gigs on photobucket and dropbox, but treat these more as temporary storage, did have loads on virgin but they now want me to pay for it, not gonna happen. like the sound of the plug and play drives chykensa especially cos of the, just usb, so it will always be on when computer is on and off when it's off.
Looked at one earlier today 2tb but was a 240v then connected by usb, so you have to keep turning it on and off, or plugging unplugging it (not impressed) well if they had a switch on them to turn on that would be fine but they don't do they?

[chykensa]

Probably not so good for storing software on Bluefish, but these little drives are ideal for music, photos, films, video clips, docs, etc.. Really frees up the hard drive for gig-hungry Windows software

[chykensa]

This is what I have - great bit of kit!
www.ebuyer.com/407777-seagate-1tb-expansion-portable-hard-drive-stbx1000201

[Bob]

Apr 27, 2014 10:01:08 GMT djs said:

Apr 27, 2014 9:44:22 GMT maccafan said:

If you want to make it reasonably future proof, get a 2 TB NAS drive.

Connects to your router and you can access files from any device connected to the router including gaming consoles, smartphones and modern televisions.

Is the drive itself wi-fi? or do you sit the box next to your router (hard wired) and send it stuff? (schedule or manual).

Sounds like my kind of thing... NICE!

Doesn't have to be next to the Router but has to be wired to the Network somewhere, I have my  Router downstairs with a 4 TB USB drive connected to it with all my music & videos on it, so it can be streamed to any device in the house, then upstairs I have a 16 port switch using a Cat5e cable from downstairs with 2*Buffalo Linkstation Duos each has 2*2TB HDDs inside in a RAID 1 configuration and are used to keep back ups of my system.

RAID 1 just means that the 2 x 2TB drives in each unit are mirrored so that if one fails, I can just replace the failed drive and carry on as the system will  rebuild the new drive with info from the good drive.

[Bluefish]

Apr 27, 2014 12:52:39 GMT chykensa said:

This is what I have - great bit of kit!
www.ebuyer.com/407777-seagate-1tb-expansion-portable-hard-drive-stbx1000201

That seems the simplest thing to get for backing up pics films etc, macca's nas drive seems a bit complicated for simple folk like me, and my next question is... I'm thinking of getting an imac, and so will need to backup, or should i say make a copy of the boot drive from new and then have regular backups, i know they have a system to backup automatically, but they say to use two separate devices so obviously you don't lose everything if it breaks.

[chykensa]

Ah, now that next questions slips outside my sphere of knowledge - I'm a PC man, nearest I've got to the Apple orchard is an iPod and an iPhone. I'm sure there are iMac users here able to answer your questions though

[djs]

Apr 27, 2014 15:57:17 GMT chykensa said:

Ah, now that next questions slips outside my sphere of knowledge - I'm a PC man, nearest I've got to the Apple orchard is an iPod and an iPhone. I'm sure there are iMac users here able to answer your questions though

I use PCs, but as we know, there is quite a lot of music software on Mac.

Hence my occasional run-in with a £5,000 Mac. Scary.

[Deleted]

I use external hdd 1TB made by Buffalo, got them on Amazon as they were about £15 cheaper than ebuyer at the time and free postage.
At worse you could always scan/tag a pub and dump your files there for a while.