Right now, my wife’s computer, and mine for that matter, only has 1 hard drive. I’m thinking of getting her something to back up her data on, but am not sure if I should just get a second 80gig hard drive, or get an external backup device. I’m leaning towards external, but what do you guys think?
Unless the only thing you’re trying to protect against is failure of the single drive, you’re going to need something that won’t be:
- Stolen with the rest of the machine
- Burned to a crisp with the rest of the machine
- Dropped and shattered with the rest of the machine
- Melted by the same lightning strike that melted the other drive
- Flooded with the rest of the machine
… definitely external. If backup is your whole game, though, and assuming you’re only backing up a reasonable quantity of documents, a DVD writer of some sort would be better. You can make redundant backups and easily store them off-site.
Also, if the amount of data is very small, consider that you might already have such a device. iPods, digital cameras, and those little USB flash drives can all be mounted as external drives. And if you’ve got old digital camera memory lying around, a cheap media reader will turn it into a drive as well.
The downside of all of these is that they’re rather limited in capacity, of course. But most people’s actual documents are orders of magnitude smaller than the junk like Windows itself, Applications, Help Files, etc. that don’t need to be backed up at all (assuming you have originals around).
A lot depends on how handy you are at installing new devices. An external hard drive is a piece of cake since you don’t even have to crack open your computer case. My approach has always been to use up all my internal slots before going to the external route. So I’d go with a second internal hard drive (faster, more capacity for the same bucks). FYI, I also have an external drive for another level of backup.
I second what TimeWinder’s first replied. Also, if your computer has a CD burner, making occasional copies of your data and storing them away from the computer is a Very Good Idea. You don’t need to copy everything, if you treat your installation CDs right, but you want to backup downloads, files you wrote yourself, etc.
If you don’t want a backup but to have a Huge Disk(s), externals have the advantage of being able to get more than one, and they’re as fast as an internal.
Yeah, I was thinking along the sames lines myself.
Her computer has a combination CD/DVD R/RW drive, so that’s an option, but I think I’ll stick to something specifically designed for backup.
Thanks.
Well, I bought the mini-tower, motherboard, CPU, hard drive, CD R/RW, CD/DVD R/RW, modem, and slapped them all togeather to build her computer, so, I’d say I’m handy at installing new devices 
But for the reasons TimeWinder gave, I think I’ll do external. That way, if something happens to damage the computer, then, unless the computer is in the middle of doing a backup( :smack: doh), the backups themselves should survive OK.
I think if I got an external drive for her computer, it would be for backup purposes.
Anyway, thanks to all of you, I’ve made up my mind on external, at least for the purposes of backup. Thanks for your input.