Thread: 1 terabyte, $99!!

I purchased a USB 3.0 1 terabyte drive today for $99. The thing is really fast and small. Every once in a while I sit in amazment at how far we have come in computing. My first hard drive was 5 megabytes and cost about $2000.00. How times have changed!!

I ain't buying it till it comes with thunderbolt
I do have a 32G on my keychain though and it's smaller than the smallest key, I bet the memory itself is the size of my pinkie fingernail

Ummmm Can one of you smart guys send me a PM with a link of what I should buy to back up my Picture files and the I-tunes music Library that is 32 gig, so I was thinking some kind of simple USB type thingy, key word being simple, OK really simple.... I was told 1 terabyte should be more than enough

Buy whatever's on sale over 300GB. The important part is the software that does the backing up.
There's a dumb way to do it, which is just simple copies of your 32GB, so in 300GB you get 10 copies, in 1TB you get 30 copies.

The better way is to not duplicate the common parts of these copies and each time record just the differences to the last backup. That way you can have daily backups of your music for years that won't take more than 50GB and are fast to make too. Unfortunately I don't know anything about backups in the world of windoze, so somebody else will have to guide you there.

If you are going to just keep it at home and don't care about portability the larger 3.5" form factor will be a lot cheaper than the 2.5" portable that Jeff bought. Also I'd bet your computer doesn't support USB3.0, so if I'm you I'd buy a 3.5" USB2.0 hard drive that the vendors are trying to offload since the computer can't take advantage of the faster 3.0 interface anyways, and when you buy a new computer that supports it you can buy corresponding 3.0 drive for much less money than you can buy it today.

may be something like http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...0597&CatId=136

I remember going on a field trip in high school to the Princeton plasma physics lab where they were braging about having over a terabyte in their computers to keep records of whatever magic simulations they were running. That was probably about 10 years ago now I can buy the same amount of memory for less then a hundred dollars and in 18 months it will prolly cost $49.99. Oh how fast technology moves.

I remember the Apple IIe's with the giant floppy disks. Then I remember 320 mb hard drives. Then 1 gig was a lot of system memory. Now video cards alone have up to 2 gigs and you can buy a 2 tb internal hard drive for under $100. It's madness...

Not saying i'm old, but i remember leger books and pencils

Gugi, is what you are describing Time Machine? I've never had small easy access to such large hard space so I've never used it. A recent hiccup with iMovie has me thinking about a new fangled drive. What are the benefits of Thunderbolt?

Seeing USB3 was mentioned I thought Gugi might be referring to this
Apple - Thunderbolt: Next-generation high-speed I/O technology.
Only trouble with this super fast connectivity is because its new the few hard drive's that connect to it will be 3x the price of legacy drives.

Originally Posted by gugi

Buy whatever's on sale over 300GB. The important part is the software that does the backing up.
There's a dumb way to do it, which is just simple copies of your 32GB, so in 300GB you get 10 copies, in 1TB you get 30 copies.

The better way is to not duplicate the common parts of these copies and each time record just the differences to the last backup. That way you can have daily backups of your music for years that won't take more than 50GB and are fast to make too. Unfortunately I don't know anything about backups in the world of windoze, so somebody else will have to guide you there.

If you are going to just keep it at home and don't care about portability the larger 3.5" form factor will be a lot cheaper than the 2.5" portable that Jeff bought. Also I'd bet your computer doesn't support USB3.0, so if I'm you I'd buy a 3.5" USB2.0 hard drive that the vendors are trying to offload since the computer can't take advantage of the faster 3.0 interface anyways, and when you buy a new computer that supports it you can buy corresponding 3.0 drive for much less money than you can buy it today.

may be something like http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...0597&CatId=136

From Vista onwards, it is dead simple to do it as you describe. You can make full / incremental / differential backups to remote storage.
I only make full backups, regularly. I also use hardware mirrored drives to protect against disk crashes.

No, let's not distract from the real issue here: that Glen has not been backing up his stuff until now
Reminds me of a colleague who had to use his Christmas bonus to send a drive to a data recovery lab because he hadn't taken backups of the disk that contained all his holiday pics and movies. His PC was only a year old and he hadn't expected it to crash because it was still new-ish.