Reliable & Safe External HD

[tomdfilm1]

Hi guys,

My 4tb external drive broke the other week from being dropped. The data recovery guys I sent it to said it’s too damaged to get any data off. I’ve lost 3.7TB of work that wasn’t backed up, absolutely gutted.. I need a external drive that will be able to take a hit or two and not get damaged.

Any suggestions of drives I should look into. I’m thinking of something like the G Technology External Drives. They’re heavy and feel very secure, nothing moves around inside. My main concern like I said before is it not getting damaged if It took a hit or two.

Thanks in advance,
Tom

[JackWolcott]

I uses the LaCie Rugged hard drives. These were developed for the military and, so the company claims, can be dropped from a height of up to six feet without damage. I’ve never tried this — and won’t! — but we move them around a lot between two studios and have never had a problem with either.

[Rajahal]

LaCie is basically a fancy case around a regular WD hard drive. They are good quality, but you can get similar protection with a padded or hardshell case for your drive(s).

I’m sorry you lost so much data, that’s rough. I used to build custom unRAID servers for this purpose, but of course they aren’t very portable (I built one with a handle, but it still weighed over 50 lbs!). My suggestion would be to get two of any modern external drive and keep your data backed up to both as much as possible. It is a headache, sure, but no single external hard drive can provide a true backup, your data should be in at least 2, preferably 3 places (i.e. two externals and cloud, or two externals and your editing machine’s internal drives).

My editing machine has very little internal storage, so I carry around two 3 TB WD portable drives, one is primarily photos and the other primarily video. I also carry a 240 GB SSD in an external enclosure that I use as a scratch disk when needed, but don’t consider it a backup (flash media should not be used as a backup device). Finally, all of my data is backed up to my unRAID server whenever possible, as well as my 1 TB Dropbox account whenever bandwidth allows.

[roseyshere1]

You still should use backup software even for external drives/video data storages. Handy Backup is what I use for hard disk image backup – if something bad happens, it’ll restore all the data really quick and the interface is very easy to understand even for beginners.

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