Do I Need An External Hard Drive ?
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An external hard drive is really just a high-capacity storage medium.
If your PC or laptop computer’s hard drive
gives up the ghost, you might not be able to retrieve any of the data
that's stored on it. For this reason, it pays to keep a copy (known
as a backup) of important files.
The simplest way to achieve this is to connect an
external hard drive, which can then be used as additional storage. This
can be used as somewhere to save copies of important files, or as a
place to keep a mirror image of what’s on your computer’s internal
hard drive. So you can restore your system in the event of a hard
disk failure.
You may find you can back up everything that’s
important to you without buying either backup software or an external
hard drive. If you only have a few important files saved on your
computer (eg digital photos), it would probably be easier to save them
onto a Memory Stick or DVD.
How Much Capacity Should I Get ?
This all depends on what you do with your computer, and what you want to use the external drive for. It’s worth doing a bit of future-proofing; the capacity of hard drives is increasing and, even if you don't need that extra space now, you might find it invaluable in a couple of years.
A downloaded, full-length feature film takes up
around 1.5GB. So should the future of TV and film-viewing lies with
internet downloads, it certainly pays to go for a higher capacity drive.
(As a general rule of thumb you should probably go for as much
capacity as you can afford.)
The drive’s actual capacity won't quite match
what it says on the box. This is due to how windows prepares the drive
for use and can be up to as much as 10% smaller than stated.
Are They Hard To Set Up ?
External hard drives connect to your
computer via a USB or network cable, and are usually pretty easy to
install. Many of the drives are 'plug and play' which means that, once
attached, your computer will recognise them automatically. Network drives will require you to install some software, in order for them to
work.
Why Is Speed important ?
If you have a large amount of
data to copy, speed is going to be a factor. A faster drive means
that you won't be twiddling your thumbs waiting for all your files to
be transferred over.
Should I Buy A Standalone or Portable Drive ?
Portable hard drives are ideal for
transporting data around and also for keeping important data separate
from your computer (on another premises, say). However, you may find
keeping a copy on a DVD a more practical (and cheaper) option.
Standalone drives sit beside your
computer and are a better option for saving large amounts of data and
also for making ongoing (incremental) backups.
How Do I Back Up To An External Drive ?
You can just treat your external hard drive just like your computer’s internal drive,
so it just keeps a spare copy of your files, or you can keep a
complete mirror image of your computer. In order to do the latter,
you'll need to invest in backup software.
Some drives come with free backup software, which lets you schedule backups and save changes to files.
Generally you won't be able to store a complete
mirror image from one computer to a different one, as they're likely
to be set up differently. So a full system restore is of most use when
you're restoring back to the same computer.
Don't Forget...
Using a backup drive with one of the new automatic "Click-Free" backup devices, will protect your data in the event of a catastrophic failure. These are clever devices that will automatically schedule your backups. Click Free devices are now compatible with Windows 7 too
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