External Hard Drives: Essential Equipment

After the StupidUser thing a couple of weeks ago, I had determined that I would seek out suitable desktop storage as well as online stuff. (I might add that I am very pleased with both Mozy and iDrive, both of which just do the backup at the interval you have specified, with no further interference from yourself. This is essential if its to be a true backup system.)

Anyway, had brekkie with a friend this morning and could feel a fit of “the buys” coming over me. I was going to go take some pix across the river, there was supposed to be some people flying kites, but the wind was almost dead and I couldn’t see anyone there, from the city side of the river so I headed down the highway to Hardly Normals, where I had seen a WD “MyBook” Essential Edition 1TB for $199 a couple of weeks back. Intended to buy it… except now the price read $299. Oops. Noticed a few other 1TB drives in the same range and decided to think smaller. I noticed the WD MYBook 500G Home Edition drive… and also noticed that it, unlike everything else on the shelf at HNs, could be daisychained to an existing drive, and more drives could be added. So, for $179, I now have a 500G WD MyBook daisychained to my existing Maxtor 200G OneTouch II. Both are using firewire to connect to each other and the computer, I may switch to USB soon as I believe USB2 is faster than Firewire400.

Anyway… I ramble, as usual. The short version is: Time Machine now has heaps of room to do its backup thing and I am happy with 700G of external storage, added to my existing 320G internal.

FYI For those who don’t have the joys of OSX to help them out. This is what the Time Machine looks like.

I arbitrarily chose to go back to 10th September and can access any file I want from that day, just as if I was accessing the Finder normally. Maybe Microsoft will produce something similar for Windows users in its next incarnation.