Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Buy yourself a backup storage if you are a responsible computer user
I write this post after a few years of experience dealing with my own and other people's computers. It is absolutely crucial and necessary to have any form of backup where you can store your personal and business data such as pictures, music and other documents which represent a certain emotional and financial value to you.
When you have just one computer at home or in your business and everything is running perfectly your mind does not recognize a certain danger which can appear at any moment of your computer's life. One day you open your computer and your hard drive is dead or just about to die. If you do not have any backup you are in trouble not because your data is lost forever as this is almost impossible, but because the data recovery is a very expensive process and you have no warranty that your data comes back to you in 100%.
The easiest way to secure yourself from this problem is buying a big memory stick 32GB or an external hard drive which can be attached to your computer to update your external storage.
Comparing costs of both processes is very simple:
1) extra hard drive or memory stick costs up from £15 to £80
2) professional data recovery minimum £200
Everyone who's experienced a hard drive recovery process knows perfectly what I am talking about. And to those who never have this issue I can only say that prevention is much cheaper than emergency.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by DrWhams on
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Amen to that. I'd highly recommend something like the Buffalo or Western Digital external drives that you can just do a complete backup of your machine on to. There's also now the option of backing up all your photos to 'Cloud' storage such as Google Drive, Microsoft Skydrive, Dropbox, etc. There's no excuse for not having backups!
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Permalink Reply by Marek on
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When the home user buy his or her first computer, the backup storage is absolutely necessary thing, because this is our insurance and safety in case of hard drive problems. The manufacturers of computers do not say to their clients that something could go wrong with their products but reality is very simple.
At the end of the day the data storage - hard drive - is just a little electronic device switching on and off and nobody knows when this electronic device will say enough. Maybe in next two years, maybe in next month or maybe just know is the last moment you see it working and next time you switch on your machine will be too late.
You can think about wasting money when considering buying this extra device but think about being on mercy of somebody who knows and sees how determined you are to see again your favourite family pictures, very important documents and data which are crucial for your business. It sounds like a sentence in the court when you hear the price for this service.
It is never say and repeat enough - think about your backup of data today becasue tomorrow could be too late.
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Permalink Reply by Protheroe O'Shea on
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Hey Marek, can you reccommend a good external hard drive between £50 and £75. I know nothing about computers.
Cheers
Ben
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I'm really happy with my Buffalo ministation. You can get a 1TB one for about £60-70. That's a good size that should be plenty for the average user without worrying about filling it up
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=buffalo+1tb&ie=UTF-8#q=buffal...
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Thanks Paul. Amazon sell it for 58 quid. and I assume it's compatible with a PC. I say this as i notice the photos on the Amazon site show it attached to a mac.
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Permalink Reply by Old-Age-Emporium(OAE) on
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But TW & PW, what do you do when your Buffalo lies down and dies within six months or a year and you can't get him to disgorge your data - according to a few Amazon reviews? Sending for the vet and hoping you'll get an Amazon refund may not be the final solution you hoped for to start with. I speak as a non-techie PC owner.
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Well if it dies then that's just your backup gone. You still have the original data.
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Yes the whole point is to have second copy of the user data in case of problem with one of them. We cannot avoid problems with the external one but at least we can avoid passing through expensive hard drive recovery. This is the whole point of this discussion and let's promote the backup storage for those who has only original hard drive and nothing else. The hardest and most difficult moments od IT engineer is to quote hard drive recovery expenses
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And my point was that when you buy "insurance" in the shape of an external hard drive, you should be able to rely on your "insurance product" not dying off within six months, without having to "insure your insurance" in the shape of an extra 2 or 3-year warranty on your Buffalo etc. (Again, I'm quoting Amazon) This way lies madness - the madness of modern technology and its madly expensive planned obsolescence. Bring back the Raleigh bike.
Having got that off my chest, I think Marek's original post was the best piece of advice I've seen on HOL since 1987.
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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on
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OAE its possible that the external drive will fail, probalby less likely than the internal one, since its being used less heavily than the internal and its being used in larger chunks at a time. The internal drive head is flicking backwards and forwards all the time and likely subject to more wear.
Both internal and external drives could fail simultaneously, but I think you'd have to be highly unlucky for that to happen. It could happen from simultaneous physical damage (something heavy falling on both) or lightning zapping both. Any hard drive can fail anytime. It could be a disaster if it contains the sole copy of your data.
If you're on Broadband, a cheap and cheerful backup which costs nothing is Dropbox, which is capacious but still limited and its no substitute for an external drive for backup. It's main advantage is that its off-site back up which means that even if your house burns down destroying all contents ... at least some files will still survive, on a server elsewhere in the world. All you need to remember is your Log-in and Password.
For some people, the value of the data on their machine far exceeds the value of the machine - not having a back up is folly.
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Again, Clive, thanks for that. It's good advice.
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OAE, I don't know what your point is. Some of those user reviews are from people who have had problems, as with any hardware (and you don't know how many of those have dropped the unit, or it got knocked around the delivery depot) . The other 90% are from people who give it 4 or 5 star reviews.
All of my hard disks are going strong after 5-10 years. Not bad for a piece of precision engineering that spins 7000 times a minute with a tolerance of several microns and yet costs about £50. Hardly planned obsolescence.
If you're railing against technology on the basis that items are sometimes defective then feel free to stick with pencil and paper.
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