How to Protect External Hard Drive

[Dave The Man]

So IF I accidentally drop my External Hard Drive.

So is there anything I can do or buy to help Protects It ?

[Pi]

triple thick rubber coating, cause you never know:)

[David]

Ha, this is a question that keeps me awake at nights. Best protection, if you can afford it, is to buy another one and back everything up, I reckon. Would be a tragedy if anything happened to mine...

[Wokko]

[K]

Some random thoughts...

There are portable external hard drives and non-portable ones. Perhaps the portable ones are more resistant to dropping, though they'll be smaller in capacity.

Normally, one thinks of the advantage of SSDs being speed, but without those fragile moving parts of traditional HDs they should also be more resistant to dropping.

On laptop HDs, Thinkpad has for a long time advertised having motion sensors, so the HD is secured when the laptop is on the way to the floor.

For non-sensitive material, the obvious alternative is to back things up to the internet, e.g. in some cloud service. For sensitive material, you have to consider how much you trust these things security-wise.

Apart from security, another obvious factor that affects any potential solution is exactly how much data requires backing up. Small amounts can of course be burnt to CD, DVD, dual-layer DVD, blue-ray. (I have no experience with the latter.) No CD or DVD will last forever, so the quality of the CDs/DVDs is another huge question.


Does anyone have expertise on (or at least experience with) any of the above topics? I'd like to learn about these things...