External Hard Drive

[hitman67]

Reading a recent thread on here about loosing data made me realise what important stuff I Have on my PC (Irreplaceable pictures from important events) so got me thinking about back up, best solution probably an external USB HDD that I can leave away from the PC when not in use and just plug in to back up then if everything does go tits up I have not lost it all.

PC's HDD is only 200gb, of which 130 is still free, so I reckon about a 120gb Drive will suffice for the forseeable future. Just curious as to peoples opinions on which ones are best, where to buy, prices ect. Not wanting to spend a huge amount of money and would never need 500gb worth so really not fussed about that.

Any help would be great. I nearly lost everything before with this machine so I feel I need to be careful.

Cheers,
Hitman.

[Koolpc]

What i did was to buy an external hard drive enclosure (Akasa, approx £20 odd) and then slotted in a new 400g hard drive. Very easy to do. Simple and well worth it.

[hitman67]

Was looking at this one from the add above Komplett.co.uk - Western Digital Elements Portable 500GB USB2.0 but it is way way more than I would ever need.

120gb Seem to float around £50 which tbh makes that seem more tempting as a "best you can get" option, might even drop into Pissy world to see what they can offer to save having to have one mail ordererd.

Will check ebay too

Stealth Edit: Quite keen on these Find Mobile Aluminium USB 2.0 External 160GB Hard Drive HD on eBay within, Internal External Hard Drives, Drives Storage, Computing (end time 30-Oct-07 19:30:00 GMT)

[Lucio]

Personally, I backup all my important data onto DVD's, which I then check are working in another computer.

For most home users this is a better method because DVD's tend to be more reliable and that most home users don't regularly change what they want to keep, just add more files to the list.

Backing up onto external HDD's is only really a pay off for companies where the data that is kept is regularly changed and accessed.