Why External Hard Drives Can Be a Liability to File Backup
We understand everyone won’t immediately convert to online backup as a solution to their long-term file storage needs. According to our most recent poll, most people continue to use a hard drive for their data backups. Understandably so when you consider the prices of hard drives are falling everyday. Check out Best Buy’s recent price for external hard drives as of today.
Here’s our position on external hard drives, USB drives and solid state drives…they really aren’t a bad option, however, there are a few things that should be mentioned when someone opts for this solution. If you’re already using an external hard drive, then you should really consider these points:
- External hard drives can store large amounts of data these days. 1 terabyte is pretty common capacity. What happens when your hard drive with 500 GB of data crashes or fails? ALL OF THAT DATA is in jeopardy of being lost. There is a big “risk & reward” here – - for a few bucks you can store all your data – - but if it crashes, you risk losing all that valuable data.
- Hard drive failure is pretty common. Google produced an amazing research report on hard drive failure trends which shows that hard drives tend to fail within their first 6 months and if they surpass that point then the failure rate rises again in the 3rd and 5th year.
- You can’t access your external hard drive from remote locations.
- You have to remember to actually do the backup if it isn’t preset to run automatically. According to our poll, 43% of people don’t remember to do their backups, 29% don’t use external hard drives for file backup and 28% actual do a backup to an external drive.
As we’ve written about previously, we don’t discourage the use of hard drives, however, we don’t encourage the use either. Backups to hard drives should be for temporary purposes in our opinion. For long-term storage of your digital assets, we suggest either a hybrid approach (using a hard drive along with online backup) or migrating completely over to online data backup.
