Mrs Tandini and I are after a decent sized, quick to access, quality external hard drive for our combined back up duties. Are there any you good folks have "come across" that you rate particularly highly? Under £100 of your earth pounds would be good, which I think is a respectable budget. I am researching options myself, but I always rate friends' recommendations high above Internet randomer reviews.
Are you talking USB external drive, that you plug into one computer at a time, or a shared NAS that you can both connect to over a home network?
In my experience, USB drives are much of a muchness, so i'd say go with one that looks decent enough and is cheap.
With NAS drives, there is a lot more going on inside that can make a difference between the models avalilable.
ProfHawking wrote:Are you talking USB external drive, that you plug into one computer at a time, or a shared NAS that you can both connect to over a home network?
In my experience, USB drives are much of a muchness, so i'd say go with one that looks decent enough and is cheap.
With NAS drives, there is a lot more going on inside that can make a difference between the models avalilable.
Probably just a USB drive, but if a NAS system is reasonable, price wise I might consider that instead.
1.5TB brand name or 2TB no-name USB drives are around £100 now, NAS is generally a more expensive option, but there are cheap alternatives. It depends how much you want to back up (for total size) how much you want to back up each day (for speed) how many computers you want to use it on (simultaneously or otherwise) and what amount of resiliency you want.
For less than 100GB of data, a cloud-based storage option like Dropbox is worth looking at. For massive amounts each day, only a directly-connected drive is likely to be sufficient. There are some cheap (about £20) devices that share up to four USB drives over a local network but some only let one PC connect to each drive at once. For resiliency it may be most cost-effective to buy two drives and cycle them, perhaps using internal-style drives and a hot-swap dock.
I think for simplicity's sake I'll probably go for a standard USB >1tb option, but a decent quality one. It's only for occasional back up of documents etc. Thanks for the suggestions as always gents!
