Backup or Perish

If history disturbs you, and you long to forget, don’t backup your data and sooner or later you’ll be free of it.
– Virginia Heffernan in The New York Times Magazine, p.24, June 14, 2009.

All hard-drives fail. Some hard-drives fail earlier than the others.

Most of us have precious and priceless memories on our laptop (we meant our laptop PC, not our bare laptop). 😉

But few of us care to do frequent backups of the priceless images, movies, billets doux and drawings on our laptop. Again, we’re talking only of the laptop PC.

As a business, we’ve been backing up stuff for several years now.

At first, we used the Archos 20GB floppy drive-sized external drive.

Then we shifted to larger external drives like AcomData and Seagate.

Since 2006, however, we’ve migrated to the sleek and larger capacity Western Digital Passport external drives.

We started with one 250GB external drive and then purchased one more. But one of the WD 250GB drives went bad recently when we tried to stop a backup in progress.

So, today we rushed over to Best Buy and got ourselves a new 500GB Western Digital external drive for $119.99.

These drives come in several colors including blue, black and white.

Weighing about 0.40 pounds (0.181kg), the Western Digital 500GB drive works with both Windows and Mac computers.

The unit draws power from the USB cable (included with the drive) that connects to the computer. In case you are curious, the interface is USB 2.0.

The drives are so compact that you can easily slip them in your pocket or purse.

There’s a three-year warranty on the drives. That should make you cheapo desis happy.

The folks at Western Digital claim that the 500GB drive can hold up to 142,000 photos or 38 hours of video or 125,000 songs.

By the way, we’ve never used the software that comes with the WD drives.

We’ve always used our old, trusted friend Drive Image software for backup. Drive Image lets you copy one drive to another or make a backup image.

Irrespective of whether you prefer Drive Image or some other backup software, you’d be a fool not to backup frequently because all hard drives go bad (the question is not if but only when).

3 Responses to "Backup or Perish"

  1. Aswin_Kini   June 16, 2009 at 2:13 am

    Nice review, infact we would love more of product reviews rather than reviews of trash Hindi movies. The odds of finding a good product are any day better than that of seeing a good Hindi movie.

    Don’t waste your money on Hindi or Tamil movies anymore. We will tell ya when we see a good one. As of now, I think you still have a few good tamil films to review. Once you get these movies from the local Indian Grocery store, try to review them and tell us.

    1) Yevano Oruvan (A superb story backed by superb performances from Madhavan and Sangeetha)
    2) Thambi (A neat story backed by a above par performance from Madhavan. Although at some stages, his acting seemed to be a bit hyper)
    3) Mounam Pesiyadhe(Film by Director Amir)
    4) Kasi (Superb performance from actor Vikram)
    5) Sedhu (The film that actually made VIKRAM what he is today)
    6) Subramaniapuram (A must-see movie. A very pratical one indeed)
    7)Autograph (A trend-setting film by Cheran)
    8)Kalloori
    9) THavamai Thavamirindu
    10)Dhill (Vikram’s second best film, although it’s a masala movie).
    11) Saami (A must-see film. The best tamil masala movie that I have seen til date. Neat performance by Vikram, good comedy by Vivek, good script etc)
    Will get you more good Indian movies. Please don’t waste your precious time and money on Garbage movies.

    SearchIndia.com Responds:

    We’ll check which ones our Indian grocery store carries. Most desi grocery stores usually carry a lot of Hindi films but few Tamil movies unless the owner is South Indian.

  2. Ænima   June 16, 2009 at 9:00 am

    I got a Seagate FreeAgent Desk 1.5 TB over a month ago for 155.. more GB/$ 🙂 although it is not as portable as yours, it will easily fit in a laptop bag. It has been working fine.

    SearchIndia.com Responds:

    We saw a 2TB Seagate FreeAgent ($299) too yesterday at Best Buy but nothing beats the Western Digital or Toshiba for portability.

    Plus, we like color in our life, literally and figuratively. 😉

  3. unknownvirus   June 17, 2009 at 3:15 am

    I assume your laptop does have the eSATA port.You should have gone for the WD MyBook with the eSATA drive. USB aint fast enough.

    SearchIndia.com Responds:

    True but the ED Passport is so portable that you can slip it into your pocket or purse.

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