external harddrives

one of mine with images just died. I've my images backed up on a portable drive. What is your strategy for storing files to access using LR on daily or weekly basis? An harddrive with housing is still the choice or you use new smaller drives? Thanks

Are you asking about a permanent storage solution or a portable one?

Hi Greg,
I was asking about a choice between something like this WD portable
or this
seagate desktop

I'm not sure  understood what you mean though.

Not sure if this is any help but recently I had an external drive go down, ie. it didn't appear on my desktop when turned on. Tried various troubleshooting tips to no avail. So I took it to a computer store where one of the techs looked at it and could actually see the drive on his PC setup but was unable to access it because it was Mac formatted. Anyway, I bought another enclosure at $30, removed the actual drive from the old one (that perhaps had a defective controller), installed the drive into the new one and it works again.

The best thing to do for "External" storage is to buy high reliability HDDs and put them into your own store bought enclosure. Get 6G SATA HDD (something that is Raid Enabled / high reliability) and then add it to an enclosure that supports high throughput (like USB3.0 / eSATA). I prefer the USB3.0 enclosures from www.macsales.com. Most of their USB3.0 enclosures are really good.

-- V

A word to the wise:

Bought a Seagate Backup Plus 2TB less than 1 year ago.  

Immediately, I had trouble getting it to function as it was advertised; i.e. I can use it to back up my HD files but it will not back up my website….as it was advertised to do.

I "called/talked to" the folks at Seagate.  All the information was taken down and the person attempted to get it to work.  He could not.  Later, i called again and went through the same routine; i.e. the person listened to me, apologized and made some excuses and that was the end of the conversation.  

Two weeks ago I received an e-mail survey from Seagate.  As you might expect, I unloaded on them.  

If you want to back up files, the Seagate is fine. I know folks who back up files on external drives like that and encounter no problems. What black-shoulderd kite was saying is that it did not back up website. He did say backing up other files worked. So if you're not backing up website, you're ok. Certainly Woodswalker was one who had an external hard drive went down on him. But then there're are also many internal harddrive went bad, too. And V simply pointed out another option that has been working for him. I guess I was the unlucky one who had an enclosure failed on me So you see, not everything is perfect. Sooner or later they all fail (isn't that's what some kind of law says?).

DChan is right. ALL hard drives WILL fail, it is only a matter of time. Hence, the best strategy is to backup, backup, backup. Of course if you have done that and the drive fails within the warranty period, you could get a replacement, but if you did not backup, then your precious data is lost.

I cannot tell you how many times I've had friends/family make this fundamental mistake.

Pradeep

One backup is not enough. Two backups are not enough. 3 backups are minimally enough. I have at least 4 copies of every image and at least one of these copies is off site. No matter the media it will fail. Quadruple protect yourself

prashant wrote:Hi Greg,
I was asking about a choice between something like this WD portable
or this
seagate desktop

I'm not sure  understood what you mean though.

I would suggest neither of them, packaged backup drives seem to have rather poor reliability.  I have an internal drive on my main desktop and the external drive is an enclosure with fan cooling to which I added a purchased HDD.  Both drives are WD red drives.  So far so good. Yes I know I should have at least another copy.