External Hard Drive Recommendations?

[RawHope]

I'm working on putting a good backup system in place for all of my photos. Just wondering if certain brands of external hard drives might be better or more reliable than others? I don't know if brand even matters for this. If you have any recommendations on brands or any brands to avoid, please let me know. Thanks.

 

[usayit]

LaCie -> Good
Acomdata -> Bad

Just my experience.

 

[CW Jones]

you could do like I did and build yourself one... Get a nice enclosure and then get a 500GB Western Digital HDD. This is a nice way because (usually) 3.5" internal drives are not expensive and IF/WHEN you fill up one of them you can buy another and just take it out of the enclosure... I have a 160GB HDD that I got for free from work and bought a nice little $30 and couldn't be happier... The 160 is nice for making my disk image every week, until I get more on my HDD haha

I would go this route over a "pre-made" one lol

 

[Chris Stegner]

If you're looking to really be safe....

Buy smaller and buy 2. I have a very large LaCie RAID, that I work on every day. I keep all my current (and older) work on it, on an ongoing basis. If any of the drives fail at any point I can pull it out, replace it and it rebuilds itself.

Beyond that, and what I think you're talking about...

Every month I take an external 500GB drive and backup everthing I've added since my last backup. Then I take a second 500GB drive and back it up again. I keep one of those at the office (not where my main work station is) and I keep the other at my Dad's house.

I use LaCie or Maxtor drives for these backups. The Maxtors or cheaper, about $100 for 500GB. My thought is, if one of those go bad, I've got 2 other copies elsewhere.

This may sound like overkill to some, but my thought is.... if my house burns down, I'm covered.... if the office burns down, I'm covered.... etc

My parents live about 5 house from me, but even if our side of town is taken out by something weird.... I'm covered.

Ever loose a drive, with your only copies of a photoshoot on it? If so, you'll understand... if not, you will someday and be pissed you didn't do something like this.

 

[usayit]

This may sound like overkill to some,

:thumbup: Not overkill but Smart.. very smart. I can't tell you how many of my clients (some multi-billion dollar companies) don't understand what you have a firm understanding of.

OP, you can also do a search. This topic has come up a hand full of times the last few months. Some good info.... heated debates as well.

 

[RawHope]

Thanks for the replies. I already have a 250GB drive but want something else too (and something with more space). So the Maxtor drives are just as good as the LaCie?

 

[SpeedTrap]

No drive is great, it is not a matter of if they will break down, but when.

I use a Drobo with 4 1TB drives in it. This offers very good data protection as well as I do an off site backup every week.

External hard drives will fail, just assume it will be at the worst time and protect yourself.

 

[burnws6]

http://www.thephotoforum.com/forum/...34-pullhair-external-hard-drive-pullhair.html

 

[LokiZ]

you could do like I did and build yourself one... Get a nice enclosure and then get a 500GB Western Digital HDD. This is a nice way because (usually) 3.5" internal drives are not expensive and IF/WHEN you fill up one of them you can buy another and just take it out of the enclosure... I have a 160GB HDD that I got for free from work and bought a nice little $30 and couldn't be happier... The 160 is nice for making my disk image every week, until I get more on my HDD haha

I would go this route over a "pre-made" one lol

I couldn't agree more. Why waste the money to have a company make an enclosure around your drive in such a way that makes you purchase another one when it that one gets full? We do the very thing CW mentions at the manufacturing plant where I work and the best thing about an enclosure is that you can backup multiple OS' and data despite the OS you are using with the enclosure. We do DOS, Redhat, any windows version, OS2 to name a few. All done form win XP. so far the only OS we have not been able to back up is SUN due to them loading proprietary software to the mother board that is used by the OS. We were however to back up the data from the Sun Station.

We store our images from the back ups to additional machines and also the network at the plant. (which is just basically multiple drive locations.) Could be multiple drives sitting on the shelf behind you waiting to be plugged into your enclosure between your next reboot of of your PC. Simple as that.