Greetings,Today I am blogging about a real life situation, and an important lesson in protecting your data files. Yes, that's right you need to be backing up your files, and data on all your portable hard drives, flash drives, and hard drives. What do you do when you have numerous important files (close to 40,000 files) on a 500GB portable hard drive that you have accumulated, or created over time and all the sudden, you are not able to access them anymore? Well this happened to me.
I recently purchased a 500 GB Western Digital Passport portable hard drive, and I would carry it with me everywhere I went. One day I went to plug it into my computer and it stopped working. I could no longer access all my important data files. Well fortunately I had another 250GB portable hard drive where I had backed up about 75% of the files from the 500 GB drive. So I lost about 25% of my data. When I called, and spoke to Western Digital, they told me to send it in to them, and they would send me a new drive. I mentioned to them about my data on the drive, and they referred me to their web site. On there web site, I found numerous partners that could attempt to save my data for a premium price.
I called these data saving partners and they want to charge anywhere from $750 to over $2,000 to try to recover the data. One partner told me that they would be charging me $149 an hour. I elected to recreate a lot of the files and data. Due to this experience, I recently purchased a 1 TB External hard (Toshiba 1 TB USB 2.0/eSATA Desktop External Hard Dive PH3100U-1EXB) drive for about $110 that sits on my desk, and every week I back up all my files on my current 250GB drive. You never know when your external portable drive will malfunction, and the files you have worked a long time to save will be gone forever.
The prices on these portable hard drives have dropped recently, and I am now finding that the protected cover on these drives are made of plastic. Any type of bump or movement on the drive could make it malfunction. So be careful when you go to purchase your new portable hard drive, and make sure you get one that has a metal casing around it. You will pay a little more for it, but in the long run it will be well worth it. I would recommend purchasing the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini 500 GB, 320 GB or 250GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive. I have been using the 250GB from Maxtor for over 1 year, and have not had any problems with it. I am about to purchase the 500GB external hard drive soon. Hope this helps you out when you purchase your external back up drive to protect your files, and data on your portable hard drives or flash drives.
Next week, I will be blogging about how to find free Microsoft Office Power Point, Word, Excel templates. Let's say your boss wants you to create a professional presentation for the staff. Where do you go to find these professional templates? I will share with you where you can download these templates for free! Don't forget in April I will be sharing with you how to use the new Flip Digital Camera software to make your own movies. See you next week.
