Configuring an external HDD

spellcaster · 8 Mar 2009 at 16:02

Hello,

As the price of Hard Drives are always coming down, I am looking now to stop burning dvd's and cd's and to have an external HDD just purely to hold information forever or as long as it naturally lasts.

My question is: I want to be able to copy files to it for storage What I don't want to be able to do by mistake is to delete the contents of the Hard drive or individual files. So I want to be able to make the files on the hard drive only readable once they are on there. I want the Hdd to apply this to everything so no mistakes can happen. Any idea please ?

CaptainCrash · 8 Mar 2009 at 17:37

If you're concerned about mistakes, you could set the permissions for the drive so that only users with admin privileges can delete files, and log yourself on as a restricted user for general usage (good practice in any case, particularly if you're often prone to "mistakes").

I think you might be approaching this in the wrong way though - any HDD is at risk of dying at any time, taking all its stored data along with it, and external drives generally live a harder life due to heat buildup in the enclosure, accidental knocks and so on. You'd be better off with a decent backup plan which would safeguard your data against all the ways it might disappear, not just accidental deletion...

mythrandyr · 8 Mar 2009 at 21:59

i was wondering if you could not buy a 2nd hard drive and create a raid mirror? if you're trying to prevent any kind of data loss would'nt that help you?

Either that or why not buy a small usb 2.0 external drive? i have a 320gb usb 2.0 seagate freeagentgo on my xbox 360 that i put movies onto and it runs sweet. Just put files that you don't want to loose onto that or an 8GB (or less) usb stick.

spellcaster · 9 Mar 2009 at 19:32

Any other options for cheap storage

my exisitng software amounts to about 100tb 10 years work. I am looking for future work to be be stored on a fast and small media device like a hard disk. In regards to opting for a 1tb hard drive it will only be plugged in occasionally to archive stuff so it should get too much use.

herr_brush · 9 Mar 2009 at 23:30

If its purely for backup use a program like EZ-back-it-up. It will synch the backup drive with your normal use drive without any manual intervention from you.

CaptainCrash · 10 Mar 2009 at 00:35

spellcaster said:
my exisitng software amounts to about 100tb 10 years work. I am looking for future work to be be stored on a fast and small media device like a hard disk. In regards to opting for a 1tb hard drive it will only be plugged in occasionally to archive stuff so it should get too much use.

100 TB? Seriously? :eek:

I'm still not clear if the external drive will have the *only* copy of your archived data - it's your decision of course, but if the data is valuable it's not a situation I'd feel comfortable with...

wnm0 · 10 Mar 2009 at 00:45

I think if it were me I would buy the required size external 2.5 hdd and copy over said work then I would pack the drive back up as it came and only unpack when needed ect ect ect...

Paul11 · 10 Mar 2009 at 08:50

spellcaster said:
my exisitng software amounts to about 100tb 10 years work. I am looking for future work to be be stored on a fast and small media device like a hard disk. In regards to opting for a 1tb hard drive it will only be plugged in occasionally to archive stuff so it should get too much use.

woah.. thats a lot of TB hard drives.

100 for the work and another 100 to back them up

200 TB Hard Drives.... pricey

Heliospherez · 10 Mar 2009 at 10:03

Just out of curiosity - what sort of work needs 100TB of storage ?

I have 12 years of work (Video/some HD video/pix/docs/music) - And I'm just beginning to get close to 2TB (with probably another 500gb on CD's/DVDrs)

Also, with that many individual external drives, the possibility of a failure somewhere is greatly increased. Why not look at a proper backup/archieving system if you are that concerned about not losing anything. External drives aren't really designed for such high capacity / critical data - especially something as large as 100/200TB - the simple fact you will be unplugging them and moving them increases the likelihood of data corruption. Why not look at a proper network based drive array - or dare I say it - Tape back-up which has better stability (and modern tapes can store close to 1TB each, even though they are sequential access and very slow)

memyselfandi · 11 Mar 2009 at 08:08

CaptainCrash said:
...snip...

I think you might be approaching this in the wrong way though - any HDD is at risk of dying at any time, taking all its stored data along with it, and external drives generally live a harder life due to heat buildup in the enclosure, accidental knocks and so on. You'd be better off with a decent backup plan which would safeguard your data against all the ways it might disappear, not just accidental deletion...

I agree, having the data store just once on an external disk may be safer then having it sitting on an internal drive, (as long as the drive is disconnected when it is not needed), from the point of view of it being accidentally deleted but you still have all your eggs in one basket. The external disk would also be more likely to fail as the cooling in external disk enclosures tends to be worse.

mythrandyr said:
i was wondering if you could not buy a 2nd hard drive and create a raid mirror? if you're trying to prevent any kind of data loss would'nt that help you?

... snip ...

Whilst that would help for preventing data loss after a disk failure it would do absolutely nothing to protect against accidental deletion of files which given the OP's questions about making the backup read only after creation seem to be important to him. Remember RAID is not a substitute for good backups.