Back in 2012, my computer crashed and I discovered that my backup hard drive by IOMEGA also crashed. No files, no back up! I thought this was typical for my techy luck, but when I went to a local PC store I found out that companies are using cheaper hardware in the back up external hard drives in order to keep prices low! Ugh, so now the "you get what you pay for" is attacking the world of external hard drives. The guy at the store opened the external hard drive up and was not surprised to find a Samsung drive inside. I'm not saying all Samsung drives are bad, but if you're looking for an external hard drive for backing up those important files, don't go with the cheaper brands or the low price well known brands. Many of them are packing the drives with the unreliable, cheap to make hard drives! (Back in the day, IOMEGA was a very well trusted brand and I thought it still way...but it's what's inside that counts...not the company name!) Anyone else have this experience? What are you using for back ups?
Just to let everyone know, I ended up purchasing an external hard drive from Seagate, which so far has not had any problems. However, many computer gurus have been urging me to let go of the external hard drive method of backing up and instead back up online. I'm not so sure I want to do that because that puts everything out there on the Internet. But, it's looking like that may be the only way to guarantee a back up. Thoughts on online back ups??
I am backing up my data to my cloud storage. I have a few. The ones I use most are Imgur and Dropbox. Imgur is where I keep all my images. I pay about 2usd per month for the pro version. For syncing data, I use Dropbox. I am still using the free plan because I have not used up my diskspace yet.
I used to have problems with external HDD, but then i found out that it was my old laptop's USB ports that were damaged and would disconnect randomly. You should always test it out in all the ways you can and in different places before complaining about the product itself.
Thanks Victor for the feedback. I have used DropBox on occasion so I might look into that one since I'm familiar with it. I had not heard of Imgur...the price doesn't sound bad at all. Do you just store personal stuff on these servers? A non profit I work with is looking for back up solutions as well. Oh and BlackSolaris: I did test the USB ports and took the laptap and external hard drive to a computer repair shop for additional testing to make sure it wasn't me. But thanks for mentioning that. Definitely test everything out before assuming its the hard drive or the laptop.
Sorry to hear about your files, mate. I know how you feel. I didn't know about this, and hopefully we can find out more about this, especially which brands to buy from starting now. As for your online backup question, I don't like it either, but I suppose it would be okay for non-important files that we would like to back up. I may start looking for a free service later since I'm kind of understanding more why it is used. If I'm not mistaken, Google has one so maybe that's free, and also Megaupload has one, I think.
