Recently I was having dinner with friends when one of them mentioned that they had been robbed. That alone was shocking but what really sent a chill down my spine was what had been stolen. Their laptop with all their personal pictures and movies. But not only that, their backup HDD was also stolen. So they had lost all of it, never to see those photos of their holidays again. It was chilling because at my apartment I have all my personal files backed up in triplicate. But where someone to enter my apartment, it wouldn’t matter how many backups I made if I left them all in the same location to be stolen. It was at that point I resolved to get an external drive that would be large enough to carry all my music, home movies and pictures, yet be small enough that I can bring it with me on holiday or leave it in work overnight.

It just so happened that I needed to buy an external HDD for my parents to give them a copy of all the VHS videos I had ripped to my computer, so along with this I bought myself a new external HDD. I didn’t really do a lot of reading about it before hand, the only thing I knew I wanted was expandability. An external HDD that you can’t upgrade will soon become useless. Like my 250GB WD MyBook I bought a few years ago. It’s huge, and upgrading the HDD inside it would be a pain. It barely holds my music collection and the noise it makes, coupled with its size and external powersupply means it rarely sees the light of day outside of my closet. For the same size I could have a 1TB drive.

So instead of buying an all-in-one solution, I went for this drive:

Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500GB

It’s a laptop class drive which means it’s silent, generates little heat and it’s small. It’s also 500GB in size which should be enough room to expand my music, home video rips and pictures into for the forseeable future. I also got it for a second reason, I plan on buying a laptop shortly and it would be nice to have a spare drive on hand should I need to upgrade the one that comes with that laptop.

For the external enclosure, I had contemplated going for one that supported e-sata, but ended up going for a USB 2 one only. I rarely use e-sata and can’t see it surviving once USB3 takes off so it would be a pointless added expense. I settled on this enclosure.

ICY BOX Pocketsized aluminium case (Black)

Upon receiving both in the post a week later, I had the HDD installed in the enclosure, plugged in and formatted on my PC within 10 minutes. A great thing about it also is that it can be completely powered from the USB port, meaning no need for any large powersupply block like my old MyBook. They have included an extra USB cable to plug in for additional power though, in case you try to use it on a PC with not enough power being fed to the USB port that you’re using.

Once formatted I left my files copying over to it overnight as, due to it only being USB 2.0, my transfer speeds where ~30MB/s in Vista and I needed to backup around 400GB’s.The next morning everything was backed up. I use Vistas Sync Center to keep it synced with my files on my home PC and as the drive contains personal files and details I also use TrueCrypt to encrypt the drive should I ever lose it or it gets stolen.

I bring it to work with me now and it fits in the front pocket of my backpack. I’ll usually leave it in work overnight (in a hidden location), and only bring it home to perform a sync with any new pictures or files on my home PC. The peace of mind this has given me is priceless though. If you are sitting in front of your PC now thinking you are sitting pretty with that external (or internal) drive for backups, think again. Get a pocketsized external drive, backup your files and store it in another location (it could be work, a friends house or your families). Plus, the hardware is cheap enough now that it really is worth it.