How Secure/Safe/Reliable are External HD's?

[HappyDude20]

I have a MBP 13inch w/ 500 GB in it, currently using 300 GB's. For Christmas I got a Flip Mino HD which i've been wanting for the longest time; truthfully I've been wanting anything to record film. Having it for 2 weeks now I've already added an extra 15GB's of filming video. With editing it's give or take a GB or two. I've uploaded most of these on YouTube however have heard numerous horror stories of YouTube randomly deleting an account for whatever reason. Simply, I don't want to rely on YouTube to house precious films of my baby brother growing up or videos of my friends and I on vacation.

Aside, I also have many GB's of photos and even a few GB's of important documents such as a will, copies of passports, etc. Also, I'd like to be able to save all the music I have in iTunes (about 10GB's) knowing I won't always like the music I listen to now, and be able to listen to it again 10 years down the road; like how I see my grandma go ecstatic when she rediscovers an old record in the garage, or how my dad cracks a smile when he finds a dusty cassette from the 80's.

The external hard drive would take the weight of carrying all these precious movie files and the like from my MBP, which I take everywhere. I'd want to treat this external hard drive with importance just like how a mother would safely store the family albums. Well, you get the point.

How reliable are they? I'm sure there are some that are fire proof but that's a bit overdoing it in my opinion. If the size is right I wouldn't mind placing it in a safe...but i'm wondering what the biggest potential risk for this external hard drive would be. For some reason i'm thinking about an episode of 24 and also in Ocean's 11 when the electromagnetic pulse destroy all electronics within its radius capacity.....

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[chill.]

to me, it sounds like you don't really need security or safety and just care about reliability and long-term storage

i wouldn't recommend a hard drive at all, i think you should burn your data to dvds. it doesn't seem like you want to move data around, more like you want to have a copy to keep and put it away indefinitely

dvds will last longer than hdd in storage. how long? it's hard to give an answer, i'm guessing at least 20 and up to 60 years in the right conditions?

 

[HappyDude20]

to me, it sounds like you don't really need security or safety and just care about reliability and long-term storage

i wouldn't recommend a hard drive at all, i think you should burn your data to dvds. it doesn't seem like you want to move data around, more like you want to have a copy to keep and put it away indefinitely

dvds will last longer than hdd in storage. how long? it's hard to give an answer, i'm guessing at least 20 and up to 60 years in the right conditions?

Hmm, interesting okay....hmmm.

My only qualm with this is thinking burning a bunch of DVD's would be time consuming while an external drive is simply drag and drop. Aside from easily being able to carry the whole external HD to wherever i'm going and have it all there with me, i'd really only like to deal with this one time and not have in 5 years to go back and burn everything back into a computer or w/e.

 

[Dozerrox]

Personally, I burn backup DVDs every 6 months or so and pop it in the safe at my parents house (a different location is always a good idea). I also run a backup every week to an external HDD.

You can't be too careful with things as precious as some of the files you're describing imo.

 

[thegoldenmackid]

If you are really concerned, back-up your external with another external.

 

[Teej guy]

Burning DVDs isn't a safe way of backing up data either...if you use cheap media the information can be lost within a year.

If you have data you really want "safe", there's only one way of doing it. You need it in at least three places and at least one of those three places needs to be off-site. Get another external and have it mirror what's on your current one, that'll keep it relatively safe, and if you're really serious, look into some off-site arrangement.

 

[Mintin8]

For it to be mega-safe, copy to an external HDD, then to another HDD, then to a disk. (Better safe than sorry). This is what I do with my coursework. I CANNOT risk losing it at all.

 

[thegoldenmackid]

You always want a back-up. Leaving the data on only one hard drive just asks for risk.

 

[Gabriel GR]

The chance of HDD failure is relatively small. The chance of a second HDD with your data failing at the same time is almost zero.

Keep your important files at two locations and if one fails replace it ASAP.

Also if you don't mind paying a bit and you need to be sure about your data, check out some online storage solution like Amazon S3. I have about 30GB worth of data on S3 and I'm very happy with it.