On a scale of 1 to 10, an external hard drive is a excellent beginner solution for basic backup and storage.
I’m a strong believer in the KISS principal: keep it simple, stupid. There’s lots of complex and confusing ways to backup your data, including a Network-attached storage (NAS) box, a redundant array of inexpensive disks (RAID), and beyond. The deeper you dig into these solutions, the more complex they become. Do you want a RAID 0, a RAID 1, a RAID 10…? Do you want to mirror your drives, or stripe them? Does any of this make sense?
If you’re like 95% of the world, the answer is no, it does not make sense. It is most certainly not simple. Well, you know what is simple? An external hard drive. That’s what.
An external hard drive is precisely what it sounds like. It’s a hard disk drive (HDD) that sits outside your computer case. Generally they have a plastic or metal enclosure, and connect to your computer via USB cable (or sometime Firewire.) Larger capacity HDD’s will generally also have a power source. Smaller capacity (under 250 GB) can frequently run off power drawn from the USB port. Many different storage and CE (consumer electronics) companies make these drives, including Seagate, Western Digital, HItachi, Buffalo, and Simple Tech and many others.
The beauty of the external HDD is the guiding light behind the title of this post. Its simplicity. You plug the drive into your computer, and boom another hard drive appears on your desktop. You can drag files onto it, or drag them off. That’s it. If you have a bunch of photos, music, movie files, or work documents you can make a quick, simple backup of all that data with just a click and a drag. You can get a high quality drive for around (or under) $100 depending on the features you’re looking for and the capacity you need.
I have several of these devices that I use for a variety of purposes – I will touch on those here, and may expand upon them in future posts. One drive that I use specifically for backup is the FreeAgent XTreme from Seagate. It has both USB and Firewire ports for connecting to your PC or Mac, and a separate power supply. The Freeagents are (in my opinion) some of the best looking drives on the market, which makes some level of difference if you’re keeping it on your desk all the time. It looks like a neat gizmo with artistic flair, rather than a janky box. I have an Extreme in 1 TB capacity, and I use it to backup my data on a regular basis. Most storage companies offer a software suite to do “automatic backups” which sync your data and update the external drive with only new files, or files that have changed. This can be really handy, and Seagate’s works as advertised. The other option is to manually drag over new files from time to time, or to overwrite old files by simply dragging the whole folder (with new additions) over to the external. Salt to taste.
Personally, I do not backup every file, only those that are most important to me. This includes some older documents, my photos, my music, and my movies. And my books. That’s right, I listen to audio books, ripped from CD into MP3 format. Running sprints or swimming to the spoken word is good for you.
I also have a Maxtor 750 GB external HDD. This one is connected to my XBOX 360. I will elaborate on this in a separate post. Lastly, I have a Seagate Freeagent Desk which I use with my Mac. Again, watch for an upcoming post for more details.
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