Home > PC
How-To > Buy a Hard Drive
Purchasing a Backup Hard Drive
When looking for
a backup hard drive, one naturally looks for an external
hard drive. Such hard drives can be easily attached to
your desktop or notebook PC by a simple USB or other
interface. Hard drives have shrunk in size recently
and many are fully portable allowing you to take them with
you in your pocket, your briefcase, or your laptop computer
back. External hard drives are divided into two
separate categories one, the portable, self powered hard
drive; and to the external AC powered hard drives.
Need help
upgrading and installing your new hard drive? Check
out our hard drive upgrade
instructions page.
Portable
versus Traditional Hard Drives
Portable hard drives are small enough to
fit in your pocket and powered by its own USB connection
(also known as USB-powered) so you don't need to carry
around a bulky, heavy AC adapter. However, since these
hard drives are smaller and require less power, they also
are limited in capacity. These portable hard drives
can be found as small as 100 GB and as large as 320 GB in
size. The larger non-portable external hard drives
come in sizes as big as several terabytes in size. The
first thing to think about once looking for a new hard
drive, is to consider whether or not you want a portable
hard drive. If you plan on doing a lot of traveling,
and would like to bring it a large capacity hard drive with
you when you are on the road, you might find a USB powered
portable hard drive the best device for you. Others,
simply like their small size simple connectivity, and lack
of an AC adapter and will lean towards these types of hard
drives as well. If you really need a lot of room to
store many large sized files such as expansive music and
movie collections, you may opt for the larger sized external
hard drives that are not portable.
Western Digital Hard Drives
Western digital is a hard drive
manufacturing company with an excellent reputation for their
external and internal hard drives. The Western Digital
passport line of hard drives is the portable USB powered
hard drive that consistently ranks in high customer
satisfaction ratings. We have been using our Western
Digital 120 GB Passport portable hard drive for several
years now and have found it extremely reliable and not much
bigger than a pack of playing cards - and powered by its own
USB-port. Western Digital also offers the "My Book"
series of high-capacity external hard drives that have
achieved similar reliability and customer satisfaction
ratings. These drives come in several categories
including the home version, the essential version, the
office version, the world version, and more. For the
most robust data protection, consider the "My Book Mirror
Edition" hard drives by Western Digital which offer several
advanced configurations including RAID redundant backup
configuration.
The RAID 0 configuration offers data
striping redundancy which spreads out your data across two
separate volumes of hard drives. For the most
redundant protection, we recommend the RAID 1 configuration
which offers data mirroring across two identical hard
drives. The Mirror Edition drives come with two
identically sized hard drives -- when you backup your data,
your data is written to one of the two hard drives, then the
data is replicated to the second hard drive (instantly).
This gives you double data protection all in one box and all
done instantly with the included backup software. The
best part about this is even if one of your backup drives
experiences complete failure, the second drive allows you
full recovery. Prices for external hard drives are
very competitive and by searching online you can often find
a very reasonable price as these hard drives are
consistently on sale from local or Internet electronics
vendors.
Backup Solutions
Once you have selected the hard drive and purchased it, it
is now time to implement a viable backup solution. The
first step in creating a backup plan, is identifying which
are the most important files on your computer. These
files are the ones that you absolutely cannot do without an
are fearful of losing. Such files may be important
financial and legal documents, work or school related
documents, or even family digital photos that are on your
hard drive. Additionally, many users store e-mail
files and folders or backups on their computer hard drive
and would like to back them up periodically as well.
Lastly, one might consider backing up a music collection
video collection home videos or other multimedia files as
well, especially if the only copy resides on your PC hard
drive.
Check out our article on how to create a backup solution .
Backup
Software
Memeo’s AutoBackup software
is a bare-bones basic backup utility that comes pre-packaged
and ships with many hard drives, (a
trial version of Memeo is shipped with Western Digital drives).
After plugging in your new backup hard drive for the first time, the Windows AutoRun dialog box will pop up asking you if you’d like to
install Memeo. Upon installation, all you have to do
is select which files you want to back up (the source
location) and where the backups are to be stored (the target
location). Configuration is very simple - and that is
the draw to Memeo - simple, straight-forward backups.
Memeo gives you the ability to backup data in sets, subsets,
from several locations (including files stored on the
internet) and manage them all from one program.
Acronis True
Image Home is a top-tier backup and recovery solution.
Acronis delivers the highest level of security and
reliability by instead of simply backing up select data
files on your PC - Acronis creates an image-based backup
"snapshot" of your entire PC's hard drive. This means
a complete backup of all of your data files, programs,
downloads, and even your entire operating system.
Acronis also allows you to create a bootable startup disk so
that you can resurrect your entire hard drive by restoring
the "image" in its entirety - a complete 100% hard drive
restore solution!
Check out the bast deals on Western Digital Hard Drives 
QUICK
LINKS
