I’ve posted this before… External, portable, USB hard drives are convenient to store some data on, but dang it, don’t put everything on one and trust that it is forever and always going to be there for you.
These devices use 2.5″ hard drives like you would find in a notebook computer, and while there is nothing wrong with those drives, they do tend to be a little more fragile and have a shorter life-span than their 3.5″ brethren.
Case in point…. Today, I was going to copy some data from my daughter’s old computer to an external usb drive… While the data made it over there, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back and other things started happening. The huge collection of music that resided on the drive became unstable. It was taking long periods of time to open the files, some were damaged and thousands were missing.
Running recovery software only resulted in finding parts of files, because when I started copying my daughter’s files to that drive, they overwrote sectors where parts of the other files had been… There’s no recovering that.
Thankfully, I had a backup, but what if I did not?
The moral of this story is – backup, backup, backup… Use something like an online cloud backup system or multiple hardware devices, and do it often. DO NOT put all your eggs in one basket and trust some >100 dollar usb drive. Doesn’t matter if you are using a Microsoft Windows PC, Mac OS X, Linux, or an Commodore 64, back it up!
Should you need help determining which backup solution is right for you or your business, please give us a call at 864.990.4748 or email info@homelandsecureit.com. We are one of Greenville / Upstate South Carolina’s premier computer & server backup specialists and we have a disk, tape, cloud or NAS solution to suit your application!