Community Newsletter: Q&A: External hard-drive buying advice and backing up data

Actually External Are Good, More Redundant when combined wit

You can have as many internal hard drives as you want, but something that no one has mentioned thus far is that every single one of them can be killed in an instant and all at the same time. I'm not talking about the "lone lightning bolt" theory, although that can happen too. I'm talking about any number of problems such as a power source that kills itself suddenly and also kills all drives and most devices attached to it (even including the mother board). This happened to me, and I had to replace basically everything on the PC because of it.

However, External USB hard drives are not susceptable to this problem (mine didn't die when everything internal on the computer did). External hard drives if used in a methodical and consistent way can be the solution. Think about it... What are the chances that it will die and fail on you? Well actually pretty good according to the horror stories already logged on these threads. However, what are the chances that both your internal hard drive and your external drives would both die. Those chances are horrible. If your internal drive dies, chances are your external won't because it would be two separate vectors (the vector that killed your internal and the vector that killed your external). That just ain't gonna happen by and large.

The only way internal and external die at once is if some one breaks into your home and steals both simultaneously, or if your house burns down and both are cooked in the flames. Not much you can do to prevent any of that though, and they are really quite remote possibilities in themselves.

Making some CD and DVD backups is a good idea for additional redundancy. But, seriously, do it sparingly cuz the earth is gonna be chock full of useless plastic junk like old back up CD's, which is totally gross in my opinion. Mainly what you should burn discs for is for ghost images of your whole system, so you can restore it in minutes after the failure back to the condition as if nothing happened, and then load in your data from the external hard drive or CD's. Ghost from Norton (if its even still around) is not the best software out there in my opinion. Drive Image used to be the best but that was killed a while back when Norton bought them out. Now Acronis makes a good back up system, and bonus is that it can schedule as many data file backups as you want on a daily, weekly, etc. basis. You can back up your photos every day if you want if you are a photographer and you add photos daily. Then other things that you rarely add to can be backed up less often. This can be superior to one huge data backup that backs everything up.

Nothing's perfect. There's always still a chance however remote that you will get screwed by fate and end up with lost data. Redundancy is best, but no war on memory loss will ever be full proof... just like all those other wars on inanimate objects.... drugs, terror, etc.