What You Need to Know About External Hard Drives & Data Recovery

External hard drives, also called portable hard drives, are a popular choice for data storage among consumers for both business and personal use. External drives offer the convenience of allowing for expanded storage capacity for your data, the ability to back up your internal drives and the ability to easily move files from one computer to another. They are particularly convenient for laptop or notebook users. They are usually relatively light weight and compact, while still able to store a significant amount of data.

An external hard drive is a hard drive that connects to your computer from an outside port. There are a number of popular interfaces for external drives, including:

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Firewire (a popular interface for Mac users) Universal Serial Bus or USB. USBs are able to connect a large number of devices, including MP3s and PDAs as well as external hard drives. eSATA is the newest interface for external hard drives. eSATA external drives follow the same protocol as internal drives, which allows for better performance from your external drive. Ethernet connections. These are less common, they act like file serves to store your data.

What You Need to Know About External Hard Drives & Data Recovery

External drives are relatively inexpensive, allowing you to take your data with you anywhere you go and access it on almost any computer, due to their portability and ease of use. These hard drives come in a wide range of different models, all with different speeds and data storage capabilities.

In selecting the right model for you, you need to know the amount of data you need to store, as that will determine the storage size of the drive that you require. Keep in mind that your data storage needs will almost certainly increase over time, and be sure that you buy one that will cover not just your short term but also your long term needs.

You'll also need to consider the cache size of the drive. The cache size controls how quickly you can store data on the drive. The larger the cache, the faster you can copy files to your drive. The higher the cache size, the more expensive your drive will be, so let your individual needs and situation determine your purchase.

One of the benefits of using an external hard drive for data storage is that it you can add to size of your backup drive as your storage needs increase. You can add more storage as the amount of your data increases. As the size of the drive increases, your device will likely need its own power source as it won't be able to draw enough power from the USB or Firewire connection alone.

Recovering Data From Your External Hard Drive

Data loss on external hard drives is fairly rare as long as you care for your drive properly, but it still can occur. There are several reasons that might cause your external drive to lose data, such as:

Physical damage Deleted partition or logical drives Files written to bad sectors Virus attacks Accidentally deleted files Corrupt backup or application data Accidental reformatting Power surges

Always keep in mind that the more important your data is, the more likely that you should take the failed drive to a professional data recovery lab to retrieve the files. But if any of these happen to you, there are some steps you can take to recover data from your external hard drive.

Boot your computer as you normally would, with the external drive attached to your computer. Download or run a data recovery program and install it on your main computer drive. Make sure that you don't install any programs on your external drive, as this may write over some of your lost data. Run the data recovery program. You will likely get options to recover deleted files, find your lost hard drive if it is not responding and recover data lost due to formatting. Select the drive containing the lost data and scan for the files. Save all recovered data on your internal hard drive. Send your external drive to a professional computer technician or company to have it repaired. It isn't likely that you will be able to repair it yourself, particularly if there is significant physical damage to the drive.

The best protection against data loss is to regularly back up your system and protect your external hard drive(s) from extreme heat, moisture and physical damage. Be sure to protect your drives against power surges or other electrical problems. Taking good care of your equipment could save you the time, money and hassle of having to recover lost files.

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