What do you do with 2tb external drive?

[vintagearms]

Movies, and loads of photos. Each photo shot in RAW is 21 mega pixels and if Im shooting a movie premiere and take about 200-300 photos, that takes space. I have two 2tb drives that I back stuff on.

[choprzrul]

I once had a 2GB thumbdrive randomly fail. It was painfull to lose that much data. Multiply that pain times a thousand for a 2TB drive loss.

If you have data on a drive, you must have a mirror of that data stored somewhere else also. You should have 2 of those 2TB drives and use 1 as a mirror of the first.

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[orchard]

Shared music, photos, and video on a home network with several users.

Also if you have virtual machines running, it fills up quickly.

[meaty-btz]

Always remember the mantra: if it does not exist in three places it does not exist.

[Casual_Shooter]

I have a 2tb seagate (which I'm feeling so much more secure about after reading yellows post /sarcasm) that holds my music and daily backups.

I hate the fact I can't rely on one external drive, but after losing an Iomega and a Western Digital external drive to the gremlin gods, I don't trust them anymore than I trust my computer's HD.

Thinking it's time to start looking to Cloud solutions but my is still tightly attached to my head which prevents me from looking too far in that direction.

[ExtremeX]

2 TB seems like a lot but really isn't these days, depending on how you use your computer.

I agree, it really depends on how you use your computer. 2TB isnt going to cut it for a lot of people.

Year or two ago I went a little hog wild with storage since I was doing a lot of photography and video for hobby. Data I couldnt afford to loose, along with computer virtual machines, backup and bulk storage.

You run into new problems when you have data that needs to be protected too, and speed issues with things like video and vmware.

I ended up building a dedicated storage server with a good hardware raid card which has about 15TB of raw storage.

[Brianguy]

Backup pron.

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk

i concur

[freonr22]

Hey casual, they have your data already

[Gryff]

If you don't have a lot of digital music and videos, then you probably don't need that much space. But if you do, you can eat up space on a hard drive seriously quickly.

I put a 2GB Buffalo Tech NAS RAID on our home network a couple of years back so that the whole family could have a spot to store casual backups, music, and videos. Even running it in mirrored mode, we have lots of space, which is really nice to have to keep your digital media stored in a place where everyone in the family can access it, or if you need to off-load all of your files so that you can re-install your operating system.

[ExtremeX]

Thinking it's time to start looking to Cloud solutions but my is still tightly attached to my head which prevents me from looking too far in that direction.

HD failue can really put a damper on your party, but im still not 100% sold on cloud backup, depending on what, and how much storage you really need.

You ever consider a decent raid NAS or DAS box for your system? Even a windows home server, or a Windows Server OS if you are a bit more savy.

If you dont have too much stuff, I would also consider Acronis Cloud Backup solution. The software has options to encrypt data before hitting the internet.

[Casual_Shooter]

Hey casual, they have your data already

HD failue can really put a damper on your party, but im still not 100% sold on cloud backup, depending on what, and how much storage you really need.

You ever consider a decent raid NAS or DAS box for your system? Even a windows home server, or a Windows Server OS if you are a bit more savy.

If you dont have too much stuff, I would also consider Acronis Cloud Backup solution. The software has options to encrypt data before hitting the internet.

I've heard those terms but would not have a clue on how to set it up. We're all Mac at my office and home. At this point, I use Crashplan. It backs up our database server to my desktop. Backs up my desktop to the external and also to my home computer over the 'net. My home computer backs up to the external at home.

I don't have a lot of storage needs (size wise), but I like having multiple copies of information- even if it means restoring is a bit of a headache.

[Gryff]

I've heard those terms but would not have a clue on how to set it up. We're all Mac at my office and home. At this point, I use Crashplan. It backs up our database server to my desktop. Backs up my desktop to the external and also to my home computer over the 'net. My home computer backs up to the external at home.

A NAS (network-attached storage) is a drive that has a small processor in it and an Ethernet port. Simply looks a slightly large hard drive, but you plug it directly into your home/work network with an Ethernet cable (rather than attaching the drive to a computer). The drive can be physically anywhere there is a Ethernet network connection and power.

There will be instructions with it, but basically you access the device through a web page where you can set whatever options it offers. It then shows up on your network like it is another computer. In Windows, you can assign it a drive letter if you want, and in Mac, you can put an alias to it on your desktop.

A cool feature on most consumer-oriented NAS is the ability to create directories with different access credentials. So you can have your own space on the drive to store your files (with its own login/password), while your kids could have one of their own (or one for each kid) with their own password.

[ldivinag]

I once had a 2GB thumbdrive randomly fail. It was painfull to lose that much data.

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in my old work, i kept telling users to never depend on a flash media as a storage or backup medium. use it to transport from one machine to another. and nothing else.

once i had a new faculty member show up. she was getting her new computer spec'ed out. she then showed me a 1gn USB stick (this was a few years ago) and was proud to have all of her work on that, that she copied from the machine from her old university.

i immediately took the stick from her. i asked her if there was anything on there i shouldnt read. she said no. so i took the stick from her. i copied to my computer. then burned her a couple CDs... took less than 20 minutes...

Always remember the mantra: if it does not exist in three places it does not exist.

listen to this advice...

1. storage one main machine.

2. storage on backup media.

3. storage on the cloud. i use my gmail account. i dont have too much life threatening/mission critical data. those that are, i create an email and file attach them to the the email. then save the email as a DRAFT. that way, it can be accessed as needed. plus i encrypt with a password.

[2shotjoe]

why would you watch it more than once?

I have not seen everything that I downloaded yet, i almost got a 1TB. I have lost my previous collection before, never again!!

[Lancear15]

Video and lots of em at that is the only likely way you can ever fill up a 2tb hard drive.

Or high res photos, if your a photog

Largest drive I've ever had on my home built gaming comps was 300gig and it never even gets close to full, but I keep a clean house.

The better question is, why is your HDD full?