External HD questions.

[Northern Lawn]

I recently bought a 320gig TrekStor external HD. I did a Quick format and stored 150 gigs of crap on it, then I did a complete reformat of my C: drive and found that all I had to do was drag back what I needed from the external HD.

It was quite a revelation to me, for instance my My Music file is over 50 gigs by itself and what I would usually do is burn all the new music then load DVD after DVD etc.

So now I'm thinking Screw Burning DVD's. I download lots of crap, I thought dual layer would be better but corrupt so many of them and sometimes nero doesn't even know they are corrupted, I find out when I try to load them back on my computer.


So, is it as good an idea as I think it is, to just buy cheap external HD's for storage? (Future shop sells them for about a hundred bucks 500 gigs on sale)

Will the info on these external HD's always be accessable to me or only when I use the exact same Operating System (Vista Ultimate 32)?

 

[akhilles]

You learned something from this, I hope. That's, never EVER trust one storage. You have to have a plan B. When I upgrade to a new drive, I keep my old drive with every byte intact for 1 week. I don't do quick formats. Either complete or low level, then complete. I do some maintenance like daily defrag & occassional complete scandisk. Plus, a complete backup of the OS drive. And data on dvd's.

The data on external drives are accessible to you in any OS anytime anywhere as long as a proper connection is made. i.e. USB/LAN. The thing is that you may be repeating the same mistake - trust one storage. Don't. Back up!