What is an external hard drive???

We've been asked to clarify some information in my previous post. Specifically, "What is an external hard drive?" To make sure I get it right, I consulted with the Photo Counselor's Computer Guru, Andy of Andy's Better Computer Business, and offer the following from him:

A hard drive is the physical data storage in your computer. An external hard drive is simply a box with a hard drive in it. External hard drives are what "techies" prefer to use for data storage because they can be updated with little or no interaction from the user.

Buyer beware. All though Maxtor is a large company, my experience is that their drives fail much more frequently than those of Seagate and Western Digital.

That in mind...using the software that comes with the drive is usually a trial software that will rope you into buying the license. It also many times compresses the data into a format that is not RAW (RAW meaning you can see it without the need for another application). We techies like data to be RAW so you don't need the software that came with the drive in case of failure.

In setting up external drives for my customers, I generally don't use the software that came with them. I set up a free program that works for you in a (what I consider) more satisfactory format. This format is simply a perfect duplicate of your original data.

To find out a bit more about this, I went to Best Buy's website, and searched for external hard drives. As you can imagine, there are a variety to choose from. The Western Digital brand offers 30, ranging in price from $95 for 250 GB of storage space to $340 for 2 TB of space. Average is obviously somewhere in the middle. The size you need depends on how much "stuff" you have on your computer.

I have not purchased my external hard drive yet, but I will do it soon (I promise!) and will write about it here, so you all can learn from my experience.

Until next time...

Lost Legacy...almost!

Working in a photo shop, you'd think I know how to protect my photos. We hear stories from people all the time who lost all their photos when their computer crashed. Well, it happened to me...almost.

I was on the computer one night in late December, and the lights blinked due an ice storm. Then they came back on. Then they went off again and right back on. When it was done, my computer displayed a very strange message. Trying to reboot only seemed to make things worse. My sweet hubby worked on it the following night for nearly 6 hours. Nothing. Seemingly, everything was gone.

Now, I have four kids. The three teenage girls all have digital cameras, and they have millions of photos. I also have a 3-year-old, and his whole life is documented on my computer. Why hadn't I backed up the computer????

The next day was Saturday, and I was desperate. I called a local computer fix-it company, and they said to bring my "tower" down to their shop. They ended up keeping it for about a week and, to make a long story short, they were able to save everything. The legacy that was almost lost was found. Whew!!

This whole thing cost me about $200, and, while I was glad to have my pics back, I didn't even have an external hard drive to show for it. That cost another $100, but I've got peace of mind now. The pics, and everything else on the computer, are safe. The legacy is ours to last a lifetime.

If your pictures could be in danger, don't procrastinate. Get an external hard drive, or burn everything to discs, and store your back-up in a different location. You won't regret it.