I need an external Hard Drive

[Brian]

Just a thought - if you're already using the cloud, it doesn't cost much to upgrade if you need more space. $20 a year gives you 100GB on Google for example, up from the 15(?) GB free you normally get.

That's a lot cheaper and probably less prone to failure issues.

[TFOGGER]

I'll have to check if my lap top has 3.0 USB or not, cool if it does, no biggie if it doesn't.

Easy way to tell: 3.0 ports are usually blue on the inside. 2.0 ports are black.

[Brian]

Microcenter sells inexpensive thumb drives. Everyone in my family is given one every year. They have been told to ke p a copy of their data on this drive as their personal backup. This year they all got 64GB drives. Next year will probably be 128GB drives. Labeling and not losing the drives is their responsibility as it is their data.
Hard drives are good longish term storage if the drives spend most of their lives not spinning. Solid state memory, and while more expensive is better for long term and comes with the easy to use USB interface.

This is also a great idea, especially when paired with a cloud solution. Use Google Drive for day-to-day use, and then grab a microcenter or amazon flash drive when they're on sale (usually for $10 or less) once a year, copy everything, and store the flash drive in your safe or something. Heck I think Microcenter gives away a free 32GB drive at least once a year as a promo to get your in the door.

[Delfuego]

Stay away from Western Digital, I have seen far too many fail. I usually buy Seagate brand, they seem to last longer.

[Irving]

I've definitely always heard that Seagate was the better brand.

[brutal]

Thank you everyone. I'll give Microcenter a call to find out if they report as I'd probably prefer them over Office Depot.

Cstone, I like your idea. The only HDD I still have are probably not something I'd want to use, but that is a great idea for the future.

Brian, I didn't specify anything because I don't really know. I'll have to check if my lap top has 3.0 USB or not, cool if it does, no biggie if it doesn't.

The plan in my head is to download the years of photos I've built up on Google to free up space there, then download new photos once a year or so. I've never backed anything up in my life, so I'd like to figure out a simple routine to do so, then do it every 3 months or so. Once I free up space from Google, I'll have plenty of room in their free cloud storage for what I need, but why not have a physical back up as well?

Besides the photos, I don't have more data to store than a few text documents, so speed shouldn't be terribly important.

Google photos is unlimited storage if you allow it to shrink your image resolution. You can also use Google Takeout to save all your photos (or any other google data) into compressed files for which you can specify the max size. Then download them to local storage. While the files are likely to exist on the local machine, I've run into cases where the G drive space is full yet there was more space used for photo storage (from mobile devices) that wasn't syncing back to the user's computer. Since there's no simple way to "select all" and download photos, Takeout solved the problem. Never hurts to have all that data stuffed away somewhere safe - offline.

As to just storing everything in the cloud. Been discussed here before. Unless you're getting offline versioning, the files are still susceptible to a ransomware infection.

[DenverGP]

For a cloud backup solution, I'm using idrive.com. $50 a year for 1tb storage, usable from multiple machines, and includes file versioning.

They even have the option once a year for personal accounts where they will mail you a 3TB hard drive, you load your data onto it, and then ship it back to them, and that data will be loaded into your cloud account.

[hatidua]

Nothing in the cloud ever gets hacked, all the naked celebrities told me so...

[thedave1164]

I'm looking for an external hard drive. I don't know anything about hard drives, but I'll try my best to give you an idea of what I want. Mostly, I'm just looking to be steered away from garbage. I can't imagine I'll need more than 1T, but I'll take as much as I can get for the price. I've never owned anything made by Apple, and probably never will. I'm looking to spend $100 or less, and ease of use is a big plus. Here is the kicker, it MUST be available at Office Depot.

This is the hard drive page for what Office Depot sells: http://www.officedepot.com/a/browse/...es/N=5+648899/

This is the one I was looking at (because it was the first one I saw): http://www.officedepot.com/a/product...Metal-Edition/

Again, I'm mostly looking to be steered away from garbage and toward something user friendly as I've got no idea what I'm even looking at.

Thanks for the help.

Without any further info as to your actual use, the one you have linked is as good as any, only do not rely on it as your sole backup, any data on one of those is just a copy. ALL drives fail, and they may or may not give you a warning, and it sucks when it fails and you have to pay someone $150-3000 to get your data recovered

[thedave1164]

I have lots of advice and opinions, but will keep them to myself unless asked a direct question