One of the things I’ve been looking at for a while are new affordable external hard drives for my computer. Right around the Christmas season, and especially on Black Friday, there always seems to be tons of good deals. Hard Drives that would normally cost you $150 could probably be found for less than $100.
But lately I’ve begun to wonder if using an online backup service would be not only a lower cost, but also a smarter alternative.
My Love & Hate for Affordable External Hard Drives:
Everyone with a computer knows you’ve got to backup your PC to some external unit. If you don’t, you’re leaving ALL your files at risk to hardware failure or nasty viruses and malware that can destroy your operating system. That means the potential to lose all your photos, videos, music, and anything else you have saved (such as the files for this blog!)
How often do you think hard drives fail? If you said less than 1% of time, you’d share the same opinion as most people. But you’d also be wrong. Depending on which kind you have, the failure rate for most drivers was between 2% and 4%, and as high as 13% in some scenarios!
If you’ve ever had this happen to you before, then you know that this is no fun. I know it really stunk when it happened to me. But here’s where the real punch in the gut came in: The day after our PC hard drive crashed, so did our external hard drive! What terrible luck!
What About Using an Online File Backup Service?
So rather than just sink money into more affordable external hard drives, I got thinking: What if I used approximately the same amount of money to instead pay for some kind of online file backup service? Looking at competitive rates from a vendor like Carbonite, it seems to take about 2 to 3 years of subscription ($59/yr) to equal the cost of a common external hard drive. Given my experience with these devices, that’s about how long they last!
One of the things I like about this alternative is saving my files to a remote location. Suppose a terrible tragedy happened and our house burned down! Even though we’re covered by home insurance to replace our lost items, both the PC and external hard drive would be lost – along with all our files. If there were at a remote location accessible through the web, then I’d have nothing to worry about.
Another nice feature of online file backup is that I’d be able to save and access my files from one central location. This would be a nice feature that would beat using a flash drive since I often work from various locations depending on where I’m at during the day.
Readers – I’m looking for opinions. Which one do you use: An external hard drive or online file backup service? Is anyone extra careful and use both?
Related Posts:
1) Black Friday Shopping Tips – Preparing to Get the Best Deals!
2) Using a Flexible Spending Account to Get Another Tax Break in Your Paycheck
3) Household Budget Tips for the Upcoming Fall
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This is something we considered at our office sometime ago. Apparently, IT professionals say you should backup to 3 different locations which is what we now do, using both the methods described above.
We have a server inside the office for storing our documents and various databases for customers, marketing and our intranet. We also store all this information on our web hosting platform too (essentially our own cloud), and it all gets backed up to a hard drive caddy at a senior manager’s home, so should the office burn down, we’re all set to work from home or a new office very quickly.
Of course you would hope we would be this prepared, because we are, after all, an insurance broker!!
One point though, hard disk drives are changing. The old mechanical versions will always fail after a long enough time period, more quickly if they are not spun up every 3 months or so. For my family photos, I am looking at getting one of those new solid state drives. They say that because they have no moving parts they don’t really wear out, and data on them should last for 50 years or more, which sounds great for storing all those pics I want to keep and revisit someday when I’m an old man.
Matt recently posted..Black Box Technology for Cheaper Premiums
Wow, 3 different backup medias? Well, it appears I am very far behind the curve on this. I too was also considering the Solid State Hard Drives. In the past five years, they were somewhat expensive, but have declined in price year after year. Perhaps in the next 2-3 years they will be comparable in price to the mechanical ones and will be worth the cost. I certainly agree that the possibility of them lasting longer has much greater potential!
I’m pretty sure that will be the case. I’ve been watching prices gradually falling, and storage sizes increase for a while now.
Occasionaly I see a deal like 128Gb for about £60, and although that’s not a lot of storage, databases don’t take up a lot of space. People at home use far more becasue they tend to store movies and photos etc. which are big files.
Although they are more expensive than traditional mechanical drives, they do also bring another worthwhile benefit – speed. With a drive that’s so much faster your PC should be a lot perkier too and it might well be worth the money just for that.
Matt recently posted..Motoring on the Cheap
I didn’t even consider that the speed of your computer would improve. Good point. That would be worth the extra money for me!
We use an external hard drive, but have been discussing also going with an online option as well. I think it can be worth the cost, especially if something were to happen to the external drive.
John S @ Frugal Rules recently posted..Frugal Friday: Posts That Ruled This Week, I Ate Too Much Turkey Edition
I agree. Having something remote would be worth the cost and provide peace of mind.
I’m one of those who don’t trust the cloud for really important things I guess. No one can access my external hard drive in the closet but me!
Leslie recently posted..What Are You Happy Living Without? Version 2.0
I have similar concerns which is why I have an external hard drive to back up my Mac…. That being said, my concerns are not that extreme, because I do still use the cloud – just not for personal ‘sensitive’ documents.
Jason Clayton | frugalhabits recently posted..Interesting Facts about the 1st Thanksgiving
Being a PC user, I was wondering – do MAC’s have the same hard drive failure rate as a Windows PC? I would imagine that all the extra junk on a Windows PC would wear it down faster …
I had considered the “cloud” as being an issue with my important documents. Photos, videos, and music should be okay. Maybe I’ll keep my tax documents to myself.
External hard drive, tho I haven’t backed up my information for a while. Interesting timing for this post, since I’m considering looking at online backup options in the near future.
DC @ Young Adult Money recently posted..Why You Need Health Insurance
Me too. The price of the online service is right where I want it to be, so I’m good with considering this service.
I am dealing with this problem right now. My laptop, which is less than 11 months old, has hard disk problem. I am told by Samsung tech support to reformat the drive. If so, I am worried about my personal documents. This experience has made me think about an online storage solution.
Shilpan recently posted..Why Do You Want to Become Rich?
I would have expected more out of a Samsung product. They have generally performed well for me in other areas. 11 months is a very short time to start experiencing hard drive issues. Definitely it would be worth it to back up the disk before anything further declines.
I personally do both, though I don’t back up to my drive nearly often enough! I think as many backups as possible is a good thing. I also understand that people may be hesitant to back up certain kinds of files to the cloud.
eemusings recently posted..Guest post: The day after the big one – what spouses should expect from each other
Its funny so many people have said they don’t backup their hard drives that often. There is usually some freeware you can get to automatically do this while you sleep. Regardless, thanks for your perspective on this. I also am worried about backing up certain kinds of files externally, so I will need to be cautious about this.
Online all the way! I just wrote a post about this recently on Dumb Passive Income. Carbonite is currently running a promotion that gives both YOU and me a $20 Amazon Gift card if you sign up through one of my links. Promotion is good until January 3, 2013. Get in and you could offer this same deal to your readers!
I love Carbonite. It always amazes me, the number of people who stubbornly stick to external hard drives due to security concerns, yet they continue to buy and bank online. Carbonite uses the same encryption methods as financial institutions. I’ve been a satisfied customer for over 3 years now with no problems whatsoever. And yes, they absolutely saved me when my hard drive crashef a few years ago. My favorite thing about Carbonite is that it is completely automatic. I never have to think about it and all of my current and older files are always backed up.
Matthew Allen recently posted..Carbonite Referral – $20 Amazon Gift Card for You AND Your Friend
Excellent point about banking online! I have read great things about Carbonite and their security protocols. I think I’ll be setting something up with them soon.
By all means, use one of my links and get your free $20 Amazon gift card. It’s delivered instantly and electronically too! None of this waiting around 6 to 8 weeks to see if it arrives in the mail.
Good use of keywords in this post too, btw! Some of us notice these things now. Haha.
Matthew Allen recently posted..My Niche Blog Curated Content Strategy
External hard drives. Here’s my setup:
Pogoplug (not stock, running Arch Linux) with:
* 6 TB RAID 5 (4 2 TB drives). The Macs and the Desktop PC backup to that disk automatically, and the media PC I run it manually.
* 2 TB External (We put things we want easily accessible on this disk manually).
I have that pogoplug set up so I can access it from anywhere – I use the stock software for my wife, SFTP for myself. So, yeah, ‘cloud like’, although if my house burned up I’d still be out a ton of stuff.
PK recently posted..The Four Pillars of Personal Finance
Holy smokes PK, you take this topic very seriously! I’m going to have to look up half this stuff later on. Thanks for sharing your setup.
Let me know if you need any help setting it up – I am pretty serious about it. After rescuing a bunch of unrecoverable images from broken hard drives I don’t want to repeat the challenge.
PK recently posted..The Four Pillars of Personal Finance
Thanks for the offer PK. I figured there must have been a pretty serious burn to make you put together such an elaborate setup. I’m leaning towards doing the online backup and switching to a solid state hard-drive for the house.
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