External Hard Drive

[Coldicote]

Someone has suggested to me that I should have an external hard drive. There are plenty advertised but what actually is the point of them and how are they any different from USB sticks for saving information? Does any ABer have one?

[Stephen_G]

I do, Coldicote.

Had mine a good few years now. 250GB storage, and it has Music (At least 50GB worth) Pictures, Documents and other assorted junk. I just plug it into the power and USB port and away I go. I used to have all my Music on my Laptop hard drive and transferred it in one go - the biggest memory stick I have is a 32GB. I only bought that to transfer all my iTunes tracks onto my Netbook.

[society]

Having an external drive is a great idea for backing up ALL your files.

I use a passport drive as my back-up drive for saving all of my files. A USB stick or flash drive is smaller and more convenient to carry around (also easy to lose if not careful). Having more than one backing-up options is not a bad idea.

This is my opinion. Someone more versed in this topic hopefully would come along and verify or correct me.

[Stephen_G]

External Hard Drive:

I was going to add what society said, in that it's a damn site harder to lose something the size of a paperback book and the weight of half a bag of sugar.

[VHG]

Memory sticks are ok for short term backup or for moving files from one computer to another, but not for long term backup (they can fail).

An external hard drive uses the same sort of hard drives as are used in PCs and laptops, so have much larger capacity.

It is VITAL to backup important files like digital photos, music, documents etc as a computer can crash, get stolen, flooded (if a house is flooded), get a major virus and so on, which could all stop you getting the data off it.

However exteral hard drives can also fail so having just ONE external hard drive is not really enough and it is a good idea to backup your data on a number of different devices in case one of them fails or gets stolen or lost.

Some companies now offer the ability to backup your data on web sites (secure of course) and some companies like Google, Microsoft etc offer so much data for free. This is called storing your data "in the cloud".

All in all, just make sure your important data is backed up.

[Old_Geezer]

I have a number of them, mainly from previous PCs that I like to still have access to files from (even though in practice I rarely do).

Compared to USB flash drives, they do the same job. I'd suspect the external drive would prove more reliable but less portable.

Rarely one would need one (save for perhaps the back-up reasons given above) unless you needed more drive space and had an issue upgrading the internal drives.

(That said if you have more than 1 PC it can be useful to have an external drives set up as NAS so all PCs can access the same data. But I suspect you have no need for that.)

[Coldicote]

Very interesting replies thank you. I was however a bit puzzled that it should be called a 'hard drive' and wondered if one should store everything that is normally on the computer hard drive - including programs installed etc. Has anyone tried to use one to that extent?

[Old_Geezer]

It's called a hard drive because it is a hard drive. Exactly the same as the one connected inside the PC case.

[woofgang]

I've got 4. One has all my digital crafting stuff on it, one has my itunes library including copies of all my purchased cds which I made digital copies of. One has business and official stuff on it. One is my late husband's with all files on including investment stuff. The bonus for me is that I can switch from laptop to desktop using the same files and saving to the same drive. Some programs don't like being loaded to an ehd and want to sit on the actual computer, I think that this is to stop commercial programs being shared.
I've also got an automatic backup hard drive that runs over the network and backs up the latest version of the computers on a timed basis.

[VHG]

>>>and wondered if one should store everything that is normally on the computer hard drive

Not a good idea, even if it can be done.

I doubt the Windows install program would "see" the External hard drive to be able to install Windows on it.

Also an external hard drive can be unplugged, therefore how would the PC start if the hard drive was not plugged in.

They should be used for backup and holding large files like downloaded movies or your digital music or photo collection.

[Coldicote]

Perhaps it's better that a non-expert like me should leave well alone, but I'll probably try a 'external' if only to save as much as possible.