External drives are arguably the biggest growth area in data storage of recent times. They offer the possibility of a readily transportable repository for all a user’s valuable data, documents, photographs, music and movies. Alternatively they can provide a destination for a user to backup their valued files to, in case the data held on their internal storage is lost, or the internal storage fails. But are they lulling users into a false sense of security?

They are being offered with ever increasing capacity and at ever decreasing prices. Many are advertised using ‘pence per Gigabyte’ prices as a lure. However a few notes of caution arise from the recent spate of external hard drives being sent for Recover data from RAID server

Unlike the internal hard drive in your PC, which is held securely in a rarely moved case, external drives are being carried about from place to place and as a result they get dropped, knocked, crushed and subject to all manner of abuse and trauma.

They have trailing power and/or data cables that only too easily serve to pull them over, drag them off desks or otherwise expose them to further risk.

Unlike the hard drive in your PC or Laptop, which is cooled by a fan, external drives seldom have cooling fans and, in an effort to make them as small as possible, the hard drive(s) inside rarely have much free air space around them. This can result in overheating with the attendant problems that causes.

External drives are an excellent destination for backing up files, but this only truly safeguards your data if the files are initially saved to an internal drive and then backed up to the external. If the external becomes the default place for files to be saved to, the data is not being backed up, it is simply being saved to a destination where it is more likely to be lost.

The hard drives found inside externals are no less likely to fail than an internal drive. Indeed where the drives inside an external are invisible to the user and perhaps chosen to keep costs low, might they be more likely to fail even without the extra risks highlighted above? Where external drives carry extended warranties, this might seem reassuring, but remember, the warranty will only cover repair or replacement of the drive, not the cost of recovering any valuable data stored on it.

So how can we safely take advantage of these devices?, the following precautions should help:

If you are carrying your external from place to place, protect it and treat it like the family silver (the data on it may be harder and more expensive to replace than the silver)

When connecting it to your computer, position it safely and watch where the cables run to avoid mishap

Backup the data on the external, or use it as the backup. Backup regularly and religiously, the gremlins know when you have that crucial file that you meant to backup, but had not quite got round to it!

When choosing an external, is the biggest capacity and/or cheapest necessarily the best?, would perhaps a better quality smaller capacity external still be more than big enough?

Is the smallest size the best?, or would a slightly larger one with a fan or at least some breathing room for the drive inside be a better option?

Hopefully this has given you a few points to ponder, and hopefully you will not be reading this because you have fallen foul of a failed / dropped / deleted external.



Thanks to Chris Solly for contributing this article to our Data Recovery blog:

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Do you backup your data? I know many of you probably do, as you should. Data loss can ruin your business, and cause untold heartache when losing precious photos and personal information. How do I know this? A few years ago, (late 1990’s) I suffered a complete, unrecoverable, hard drive failure on one of my primary computers. Luckily, I wasn’t nearly as “digital’ back then, and had most of my important data “backed up” in hard copy.

The data loss I suffered from that hard drive failure was still very inconvenient. I spent weeks trying to replace everything I had lost, but still ended up missing quite a few very important items that I simply could not reproduce. I had several digital recordings of friends, and family members, pictures, documents, licenses, software etc. that were gone forever. After piecing my life back together over the course of those next several weeks and months, I vowed to myself that I would never endure such a thing again.

My data backup routine has undergone several revisions over the years, to the point that I felt very comfortable with my current situation. I have had data loss issues that this system has saved me from, but with the amount of data I have these days, both business and personal, any data loss would be disastrous. I currently have in place, three redundant backup systems, including dedicated file servers, and very large external drive systems in a complicated array, fire-walled, locked down, and automatic, which provides a nice feeling of security.

That sense of security has helped me sleep well at night for several years. I didn’t know of anyone, this side of a major corporation, which had a better backup system in place. I have been in and around IT industry for years, and it would scare you to see how some fairly large businesses treat their backup systems.

I have seen more than one go out of business due to data loss. As a matter of fact, statistically, one in two businesses fail, following a catastrophic data loss. The costs of reproducing/recovering data are so high, (basic recovery starts around $3000 and increases exponentially with the amount of data to be restored) if it’s even possible, that most simply can’t afford it. Aside from that, without your data you are effectively out of business until that data is replaced.

So, what am I leading up to? Did I suffer a recent catastrophic data loss? Thankfully, the answer to that question is no. But, even with my overkill backup plan I still hadn’t accounted for one thing, and a very large thing indeed. All of my data was still stored on-site! What finally shook me from my false sense of security?

The weather! That’s right, the weather. The weather has been incredibly crazy lately, with tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods. You name it. I read a story recently about a Dentist whose office was hit by a tornado. His hard-copy files and X-Rays, were found as far as 150 miles away. His electronic records are gone forever. He’s one of the unfortunate one’s whose business is gone with it. He didn’t have a data backup plan, and everything he worked for was wiped out in an instant. Aside from the weather, my next greatest concern is fire. Even with my system, it is unlikely that any data would be recoverable in the event of fire. Would yours?

My sense of security has been false, my data not nearly as safe as I would like to have believed. Anything can happen, human error, software failure, theft, sabotage, fire, and flood. It does happen. It is not a matter of if, it’s when. Statistically, on average at least once in 3 years, you will undergo an event which results in some from of data loss. Hardware failure ranks very high in that scenario as well. I decided I won’t let it happen to me. That’s why I recently decided that along with my on-site backups, I will also be performing off-site backups as well using an online backup service.

If you would like to learn more about offsite data backup, and receive a tremendous 30 day trial of an online backup service, completely free of charge, please visit Remote Data Backups.



Thanks to Taylor Michaels for contributing this article to our Data Recovery blog:

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