External Hard Drives
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External Hard Drives

Price comparison searches for external hard drives (portable hard disks) on Kelkoo.co.uk

• External hard drives by brand:
  • External Buffalo hard drives
  • External Seagate hard drives
  • External Western Digital hard drives
  • External Iomega hard drives
• FireWire external hard drives:
  • 4 TB FireWire external drives
  • 3 TB FireWire external drives
  • 2 TB FireWire external drives
  • 1 TB FireWire external drives
  • 500GB FireWire external drives
  • 400GB FireWire external drives
  • 300GB FireWire external drives
  • 250GB FireWire external drives
• USB 3/USB 2 external hard drives:
  • 4 TB USB external drives
  • 3 TB USB external drives
  • 2 TB USB external drives
  • 1 TB USB external drives
  • 500GB USB external drives
  • 400GB USB external drives
  • 300GB USB external drives
  • 250GB USB external drives
• External hard drives:
  • 1 TB external drives
  • 500GB external drives
  • 400GB external drives
  • 300GB external drives
  • 250GB external drives
  • 200GB external drives
  • 160GB external drives
• Use your own hard drive - buy an enclosure
  • Hard drive enclosures
  • SATA Hard drive enclosures
  • 2.5" Hard drive enclosures

Network Attached Storage (NAS) drives

NAS drives are becoming more popular, especially for backup in home/office environments with more than one PC:

• Network Attached Storage (NAS) hard drives
  • Buffalo NAS hard drives
  • Seagate NAS hard drives
  • Western Digital NAS hard drives
  • Freecom hard drives
  • Iomega NAS hard drives
  • LaCie NAS hard drives
  • Maxtor NAS hard drives

• Network Attached Storage (NAS) hard drives
  • 4 TB NAS hard drives
  • 3 TB NAS hard drives
  • 2 TB NAS hard drives
  • 1 TB NAS hard drives
  • 500GB NAS hard drives
  • 400GB NAS hard drives
  • 300GB NAS hard drives
  • 250GB NAS hard drives
  • 200GB NAS hard drives
  • 160GB NAS hard drives
  • NAS enclosure for hard drives - use your own hard drive

External hard disk manufacturer websites

• Buffalo-technology.com
• Western Digital
• Seagate
• Iomega.com

Backups and Portable Storage

External drives offer the opportunity to make backups, archive data, and add portable storage to your system.  Online backup services can add backup that is available in the event of theft or fire to your local machines.

How much storage?

The amount of storage you need obviously depends on what you want to backup.  You may want to allow space to for regular backup of all of your data, as well as space to backup restore images for your PCs so that you can more easily restore your data in the event of hard disk failure.

Backup software

Backup software should be flexible, allowing you to backup the files you chose, and easy to use - ideally something you can setup to automatically run in the background whilst you work or surf.  The software manufacturers Acronis, EMC Retrospect, Roxio, Symantec all all offer backup software.

Storage and storage software reviews

• Personal Computer World site includes a backup tools reviews section.
• Trustedreviews.com/storage/ - Storage reviews on TrustedReviews.

Backup software searches:

• Acronis software (Acronis.com)
• EMC Retrospect software (Emcinsignia.com)
• Orlogix software (Orlogix.com)
• Roxio software (Roxio.com)
• Symantec software (Symantec.com)

Some drives include free backup software

Some external drives include good backup software, especially the larger, more expensive drives aimed at businesses.

• Western Digital and Buffalo offer software from Memeo.
• If you own an internal or external Seagate or Maxtor drive (Maxtor is now owned by Seagate), the disk utility DiscWizard is freely downloadable from the Seagate site is a cut-down version of Acronis True Image Home Edition and offers disc imaging and cloning.  It requires that a Maxtor or Seagate drive be present when the program is run.

Online backup

There are a  number of online backup sites that offer space for you to backup your data, so that you can put some of your data safe from physical calamities (fire or theft):

• Backup.com
• Box.net - 1GB free
• Diino.com
• Idrive.com
• Mozy.com
• Shutterfly.com allows unlimited free storage of photos

Note that this industry is in a state of flux, with a number of providers shutting down their services with little warning.  Ensure you have a secondary form of backup.

Given the cost and speed of access to online backup storage, you may want to limit storage to only your most essential files.  Ensure that your backup software or online backup provider include AES encryption, as used by the US military and in secure Wireless Networking.  However, if your backup software or online backup provider doesn't include encryption you may want to look at software that encrypts files, such as TrueCrypt or AxCrypt.