USB External Hard Drives

USB external hard drives are extremely useful for a variety of tasks.

They provide one of the best ways, if not the very best way to back up whatever is important to you on your hard drive. They are a great way to move files between office and home. You can keep large or numerous files such as photo, music, and video files on the external drives without filling up the computer’s hard drive and quite possibly slowing it down. (If you do this, though, be sure to back up any of the important files to something else too. You always want at least two copies of the important stuff, to thwart Murphy’s Law that if anything can go wrong it will.)

We would all like to think that our computers won’t crash but the sad reality is that they could. Having data backed up is important for whatever projects you are involved with. While businesses typically do have backup schedules, far too many home users have never backed up anything… and even businesses can be lax about keeping current with their backups. Another way that backing up data files can be valuable is if a virus or other malware infects a computer, then it can be repaired without losing the data.

USB external hard drives are one of several ways to back up data. They are arguably the best. CDs and DVDs are much slower to copy to, and not as good for the environment since you keep needing to buy more, use them, and throw the old ones out. (Be sure to scratch them up a lot before throwing them out if you have anything private on them.) Small USB flash drives don’t hold much and are easy to lose. Online backup services can be a good solution at times. Our business tried two such services but we had problems with both. Since we switched to using the external drives, we back up much more regularly and easily. We use three USB drives. One is mostly archival now. We rotate the other two between office and home. By the way, you can password protect folders on these drives if you want to. There are many software programs that do this.

These drives are very portable and lightweight, weighing two or three pounds. They are smaller than most paperback books. They come in different colors, which is convenient for rotating them. We’ve often said “Where’s the red drive?” and our rotation calendar, on a dry erase board, notes something like “John bring black drive from home.”

It is easy to use USB external hard drives. Usually, you simply plug them into a USB port on your computer and the drive will appear as another drive on the computer. This plug-and-play feature does not exist on all drives, though. Some manufacturers require that you install drivers before they will work. This is not hard to do, but avoid it if you expect to be sharing the contents of your drive with friends, relatives, or co-workers. Any drive described as “plug and play” is easiest to share with others.

It’s not difficult to take good care of these drives. Do detach them from the computer when you are not using them. Keep them in a convenient location (so you will use them) but in one where they aren’t going to get dusty or wet. If you have cats near your computer, be sure that the external hard drive isn’t where cat hair collects. Keep them out of direct sunlight… the drives, not the cats! With all this, the drives should last well — two of our three drives are quite a few years old now — and it is comforting to know if there should be any degraded data on such a drive, USB data recovery software does exist.

In using your drive, expect that the backups will take a while, possibly  longer than you expected. This has to do with the speed at which the data goes through the USB ports. There is another technology for connecting external drives to computers, called Firewire, which is faster but much less widely used.

In sum, USB external hard drives have saved a lot of people a lot of time, money, and frustration! Choose one from a brand that you have heard of, from a reputable dealer, and get those files backed up regularly. I think you’ll be glad you did. And to get you started at least, here is a list of USB external hard drives at Amazon.com.

Portable external hard drives provide some important options to computer users, for large businesses, home based businesses, and home computer owners. Read the rest of this entry »