What with copious digital photos and music downloads, we’ve almost used up our 38GB of C and D drive space.
So, should I invest in an external hard drive on which to store all our family pics? How much space does WinZip save? What other options are there?
Suggestions? Cheers.
[quote=“LagerLout”]What with copious digital photos and music downloads, we’ve almost used up our 38GB of C and D drive space.
So, should I invest in an external hard drive on which to store all our family pics? How much space does WinZip save? What other options are there?
Suggestions? Cheers.[/quote]I think it’s definately a good idea to store your precious media as much as possible. External HD definately, DVDs as well. Hard drives can die at any given moment, although generally you’ll get some warning signs. I back up my photos regularly on my external f/w HD and occassionly onto DVD media. External HDs are pretty cheap too.
I would absolutely second that statement. Out of inexperience and general stupidity, we have lost two laptops (or rather their hard-drives) in the past few months and almost lost all our digital family pics … thanks to the kind people at Asus and the friendly guys at The Hub we were able to retrieve all data from the faulty drives, currently looking for an external harddrive for regular back-ups - any recommendations?
Just buy a bigger - say 80 or 100 gig - hard drive install it as another drive. Simple to do and considering the size darn cheap. You might even just copy all yr stuff over to it, make it your main and use the old one as a slave/additional drive.
TC
Thanks, but I don’t really understand the last bit. I’m pretty clueless when it comes to techie terminology.
Also, how much would a 80-100 gig HD cost? Can you recommend a good one? As I understand it, speed and performance can vary greatly.
Lagerlout,
Try these on for size. External Hard Drives - USB / Firewire. In Taiwan, they’re not as expensive.
The other alternative you can do is to buy a bare hard drive and buy yourself the external casing for it. Any 3C or Nova would have them as well as Guanghua.
Yellow Cartman & others
Cheers. You’ve all been very helpful.
I’ll start shopping around.
for pictures and music, zero, and in fact using a zipper might even increase space. Why? Because pics and music are already compressed to the limit.
flaqboy
OK, thanks. Music & pics were exactly what I intended zipping. You’ve just saved me heaps of time.
Cheers!
drives are really cheap. I was looking at 200+ gig HD’s; they’re about $3k. Less space costs less.
You can clone your drive to the new one with a program like Acronis True Image. Keep both drives in your computer. C, D, E, F, or one as C, the other D.
Use your newer bigger drive and keep the old inside to backup. You could even have automatic syncing of the folders you want backed up.
delete the family pics, in case you like them make a copy on cd or dvd frist
[quote=“gary”]drives are really cheap. I was looking at 200+ gig HD’s; they’re about $3k. Less space costs less.
You can clone your drive to the new one with a program like Acronis True Image. Keep both drives in your computer. C, D, E, F, or one as C, the other D.
Use your newer bigger drive and keep the old inside to backup. You could even have automatic syncing of the folders you want backed up.[/quote]
Where do you go for these prices? I went to Fnac the other day (o.k., probably not the bottom end of the market, but it’s just around the corner …) and the biggest “naked” drive they had was 80G and the price was NT$7,500.-, a small case for it would have been NT$1,900.- … all in all rather pricey compared to what you’re qouting. Do I have to go to Guanghua market or is there anything closer to Tianmu/Shihlin I could go?
Ta, Xpet.
Are external HDs less likely to go kaput that regular internal ones? Are they more robust or something?
I’m thinking of getting a nice big external HD but I’ll probably back up on DVDs as well just in case!
The “external” HDs are just regular HDs in a tin case with a USB interface.
The laptop HDs should be a little more robust, and you don’t need a power supply for the external case… but they are a lot more expensive.
A cheap external case for a 2.5" HD is around NT$400.
I have two external laptop HDs, and I haven’t had any problems so far, even though I don’t treat them very gently.
[quote=“LagerLout”]What other options are there?
Suggestions? Cheers.[/quote]
I just delete all my porn. That always frees up at least 10gigs (and make room for more 
).
I think I’d go with getting a second hard drive installed and make backups to DVD (or something). A second drive’d probably be about 2,000-3,000NT. Installing it yourself isn’t too hard, or you could get me to do it for a few cans of beer (<–Beer is the currency of the future, I’m stocking up).
I skimmed the first 2 pages of this link here. They seem to have good pictures and stuff on how to go about installing one yourself (plus this cartoon old dude with a really pimp beard):