External Hard Drive? Which One?

[Huntbear]

I have decided I need to back up files, specifically pictures.

I am looking at External hard drives.  Western Digital seems to be a decent brand, but am venturing into unknown territory for me.

I want a 1 TB and be Windows compatible.

Any help would be appreciated.

Oh, and refurbished?  Or avoid like the plague?

[h20hunter]

Check on amazon...bought this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Elements-Desktop-External/dp/B002QEBMCI/ref=sr_1_2?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1330017912&sr=1-2

Works as easy as anything I've ever tried.

[Knocker of rocks]

They are cheap enough that new is the way to go. 

I don't like aotomatic models, I like to put the photo files in the HD myself.  I also run two seperate parallel ExHD's for photo's.

Memory sticks are becoming large enough that they can operate as effective tertiary file storage also

[Caseyd]

Western Digital is good. They sometimes have external HD's at Costco for good prices.

[Miles]

I use a Seagate and haven't had any issues with it.  You can leave it hooked up and allow automatic updates, or just plug it in and backup periodically.   I myself just plug it in every now and again and do a backup of all my new stuff.

[TheHunt]

You have picked the two most popular which is the Seagate and Western Digital.  Either one is good. I have done the same thing for my son and daughter for their college computers. It saved their butts twice.

[CoachNemo]

Both WD and Seagate are good drives.

You may want to consider 2 drives.  I do this at home; a daily backup to one drive and a weekly to another.  This way if I have a failure (does happen sometimes) I at most lose a week if the backup is somehow failed as well.  I also use Macrium Reflect (free) and create an "image" of my system, so that if a Windows update or something like that causes a major failure, I can restore the image in about 15 minutes or so.

This has saved my bacon countless times over the years

[adamR]

Having two is a good idea, I had one with about 700 gbs of music on it and the stupid cat knocked it off the desk, knocked something out of place in it and it's shot.  Tried having people fix it and it apparently can't be done.  I lost all my music because I relied on one hard drive.

[huntnphool]

 I have a couple 1TB drives by Seagate and have no complaints, I picked them up at Costco for $80/ea a while back, not sure what they cost now though.

[Curly]

Having two is a good idea, I had one with about 700 gbs of music on it and the stupid cat knocked it off the desk, knocked something out of place in it and it's shot.  Tried having people fix it and it apparently can't be done.  I lost all my music because I relied on one hard drive.

That should have been just the excuse you needed to shoot the cat.

[TheHunt]

You can buy three and make and make a RAID drive.  That way if one goes down you just hot swap it and your still up. 

[Johnb317]

Seagate

[pianoman9701]

I got a simpletech 1 TB a few years ago and it works fine. I think you could get one at Costco for about $75.