When Good Drives Go Bad
If you have a USB portable drive and have followed a proper backup procedure, a hard drive crash is not much more than a nuisance. You buy a new drive, plug it in the defective drive's slot and do a Restore From Backup and things are back to normal.
What if you didn't have a proper backup? Is there anyway you could recreate those files? Retake those photographs that were stored on your hard drive? Probably not. When my drives crashed, I hadn't done anything wrong. It just happened and I hadn't backed up. I had to round up the serial numbers of my software, call Microsoft and get an activation code so I could load Windows onto the new drive, reload the software and so on ad nauseum.
Had I had a backup, I would have been looking at a days outage instead of a frustrating 2 weeks of trying to recreate the files and finally giving up. I now have two USB portable drives on my system, but I am embarrassed to say, my backup is months old. That is a situation that I am going to remedy forth with.
I hope you will do the same. They gave the drives the proper name...hard drive because when they crash, it is hard. It doesn't have to be anymore.... Think USB portable drive.
USB Portable Drive Suggestions For USE As Backup Drives
 | Western Digital MyBook Mirror USB Portable Drive The WesternDigital MyBook Mirror USB Portable Drive is not your normal drive. It is a device containing 2 drives. The unit is more than just a lot of storage capacities. The Mirror Edition gives you the security of RAID 1 or the massive storage of RAID 0 with just a click of your mouse. When configured as Raid 1, all data is put on both drives. In the event of catastrophic failure on one drive, the other drive contains everything. This drive may very well turn out to be something you don't want to do without. |
 | Seagate FreeAgent USB Portable Drive The Seagate Free Agent Xtreme is a really great drive for use as backup for all of your files. It has a capacity for 1TB of storage. That is more than sufficient to backup every drive I have ever seen in use. It comes with Seagate Manage, a light software suite that including backup, sync, and security functions, all of which worked very well. You can program the backup software to backup a specific area of the hard drive or a set of selected folders and files. Next, you can create backups immediately or schedule them to run automatically. |