[Tech Question] Wanting to clean out my laptop, what external drive is best for me?

[Pingonaut]

My laptop is about a year old and my files are mismatched all over the place, games spewed about all over the virtual bookshelves. I want to move all of my necessary and sentimental files onto an external hard drive and send my computer back in time, so it is as it was when I bought it.

What external hard drive should I use? I don't have a large amount of files, so I don't need a big one. I'm really not tech savvy and don't want to buy an overly expensive one, or one that is too big for my needs. Where should I buy it from?

I would appreciate any help you could give!

Pingonaut

[Nibb31]

Get a NAS, with two mirrored disks in RAID. Disk drives fail, and losing all your files suck.

[Seret]

A NAS is an excellent idea, but you'd have to spend a bit extra. How much data do you actually need to back up? You might not need to bother with a drive at all, you can get some pretty big USB sticks and SD cards.

In general though, this would probably be a good time to think about how you're protecting your data. You want something with redundancy, you want it automated, and you want to safeguard that with offline backups.

[Pingonaut]

I really don't have very much I want to keep. How big do the USB sticks get? How much would it cost?

[Nuke]

first figure out how much stuff you actually need to store. then find a hard drive of at least twice that capacity. going external, try to get one with the best interface available. esata is best (but not all machines have one), usb 3.0 comes in second (and would be a major bottleneck if its an ssd, fine for mechanical), usb 2.0 comes in 3rd. while i use sdcards and usb drives as my sneaker net of choice, i dont trust them enough to store data on them permanently (also cats like to steal them). ive had many of them go bad (missing) on me.

Edited April 1, 2014 by Nuke

[Seret]

I really don't have very much I want to keep. How big do the USB sticks get? How much would it cost?

I'm not in the US, but US Amazon seems to have 32GB USB sticks for about $15-20, 64GB for about $30, or 128GB for about $75. For reference, 32Gb would probably be big enough for most people's music collection. You really should suss out how much stuff you've got though.

USB sticks and the like are fine for a quick backup so you can do your reformat, but like Nuke says they aren't a proper long-term backup solution. I don't think external drives are either FWIW.

[Rjhere]

My advice is to get a simple 1TB external USB 3.0 drive to store things. If you want something safer, buy a SSD and you can buy icybox or something which makes any harddisk or SSD into an external drive

[Pingonaut]

I'm not in the US, but US Amazon seems to have 32GB USB sticks for about $15-20, 64GB for about $30, or 128GB for about $75. For reference, 32Gb would probably be big enough for most people's music collection. You really should suss out how much stuff you've got though.

USB sticks and the like are fine for a quick backup so you can do your reformat, but like Nuke says they aren't a proper long-term backup solution. I don't think external drives are either FWIW.

I'm betting this is all I need.