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A very big kudos to Leigh for helping me out. I reformatted the computer over the weekend and thanks to Windows’ inability to recognise large hard drives by default, it wiped out the partition data on my recent photos – roughly 12 months worth. I’ve been trying to restore it for the past few days and finally making progress on it.

This little (yet major) scare has made me ponder more seriously about backups since hard drives and external enclosures are fairly cheap nowadays.

So now it's time for backups each time I finish something and potentially getting a safe to store them in.

same thing happend to me too....browsed the net for a few hours for a solution, and ended up finding getdataback for ntfs, saved everything!

I now have 1000gb of hard disk storage. 400gb in the computer and two 300gb externals which are turned off except when copying data to them. When they are full I will simply buy another.

I have:

120Gb laptop H/D partioned to: System (40Gb) and Programs (70Gb)
250Gb backup of Programs and other client associated files
120Gb backup of pics (also written to DVD)
120Gb floating for various uses
80Gb for use with parallels
80Gb System backup
200Gb for movies
250Gb in Mvix media centre with movies and 40Gb mp3 audio
120Gb work in progress files and ”to DVD” files (for backup)

Now looking at an Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ with 4x 500Gb SATA drives

Cautious Who me

i have 3 systems running at the moment (1 new pc, 1 old pc, 1 laptop) with about 500gb of storage between them.

it's a bit of a pain in the neck swapping files between them, i prefer to only run one system at a time (dont like wasting power...), so an external hard drive solution is intriguing to me.

for those that are using external hdds:

how does windows view a external hdd (typically) - is it just PnP, with the drive appearing as a removable disk?

and what are prices like?

jamesw wrote:is it just PnP, with the drive appearing as a removable disk?

and what are prices like?

Assuming you are using XP, then yes, it's PnP and shown as a removable disk.

I bought an external Western Digital 320Gb one for around $200 recently. 500Gb version is around $280 to $300. Note, internally, these are just normal 3.5" drives so they have an external power brick. Only the 2.5" ones (which max out at, I think, 160Gb) can be powered by USB.

As with most PC hardware, it will be slightly cheaper if you build your own (i.e. buy a 2.5" or 3.5" harddisk and an appropriately sized external case from the great auction site).

Ben

sirhc55 wrote:I have:

120Gb laptop H/D partioned to: System (40Gb) and Programs (70Gb)
250Gb backup of Programs and other client associated files
120Gb backup of pics (also written to DVD)
120Gb floating for various uses
80Gb for use with parallels
80Gb System backup
200Gb for movies
250Gb in Mvix media centre with movies and 40Gb mp3 audio
120Gb work in progress files and ”to DVD” files (for backup)

Now looking at an Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ with 4x 500Gb SATA drives

Cautious Who me

Hahah... Chris you should go with two separate NAS in RAID 5 configuration and have them back each other up.

jamesw wrote:and what are prices like?

For a 3.5" hard drive, 320gb or 400gb seems to be the best value (this could be out of date with the rapid pace of computer tech)
Try http://www.staticice.com.au/ for prices.

I buy my drives and stuff from MSY. Very cheap. Usually get my cases from Mac shops. More expensive, but I use firewire.
http://msy.com.au/

http://www.epowermac.com.au/prodtype.as ... istory=cat
http://www.streetwise.com.au/index.php?cPath=28_136

Hi Wayne,

I hate down time and HD's that fail and mother boards that do the same really grrrrrrr oh well that's PC's. We had a mother board fail on one machine in Dec and it's only been the last week we finally got all pics reconstructed. We had (not they they where needed) backup's of all the pics but not the Photo shop Elements Catalogue. We use elements in our work flow as the primary catalogue tool.

We are running 2 seperate systems each with 600GB of storage and matching the same in ethernet HD's for backups. We run also another system for video editing with around 700GB on board firewire and the same but USB connect for backup. So important and initially to set up costly and time consuming but if we lost our lifes work we'd be deverstated. Hope it all gets put back together soon........

Mark

For my laptop (main machine), I have 80Gb onboard. In addition, I have
Also a 1Gb Microdrive that lives in the machine for an instant backup when away from homes
In Canberra
100Gb External via USB Is is synched to main onboard drive, so is effectively a mirror
500Gb External via Ethernet. This gets a regular copy of all changed files in MyDocuments (xcopy...)

In Wentworth Falls
100Gb as per Canberra
500Gb as per Canberra (I don't turn off the Archive bit here though)
200Gb gets an irregular proper backup of system files

I have a little trouble resynching when I move locations as the Sync program I use was designed for moving files between two different computers, rather than the use I make of it, but In effect, I can get my computer & one house nuked, and I have still lost at most only the most recent files. Mind you if it is a genuine nuke attack I will go up with the laptop - it is never far away.

For those looking at NAS solutions I suggest you check out the Thecus 5200 as well as the ReadyNAS. I've just been down this path, bought the Thecus (better value than the ReadyNAS) and am more than happy with it. Now running with 3 x 500gb drives in RAID 5 config.