External Drives And The Cloud

Now it seems rather minuscule.
With the largest drives currently at 3TB and growing, there seems to be an insatiable appetite for even more capacity.
And now manufacturers have found an additional way of satisfying your needs with the buzz word of the moment...
cloud! For those of you unfamiliar with the term, cloud is storage or web space hosted by companies on their own servers which you can utilise usually for a small fee for your own storage purposes.
This would typically be for your photos, music, videos and documents etc.
and offers the advantage of having access to them wherever you are in the world.
The other main plus point is that you can backup your digital life and have peace of mind that you will always have a copy of your important files.
External hard drive manufacturers are now beginning to offer this service with certain models whereby a year's worth of cloud access is included in the price of the drive.
Thereafter you will have to pay to continue using the service.
Lacie is one such company coining their offering "Cloudbox".
You can backup your files to the admittedly limited 100GB drive but the great thing about it is that it will transfer your files to the cloud while your computer is switched off.
As uploading is a lot slower than downloading, this means you don't have to sit around for what could be a considerable time while the backup process takes place.
For those with big data files this is an additional means of security while not restricting you to the size of the external hard drive itself.
Hitachi with the Touro Mobile Pro is another company that offers this service.
Their take is that once you upgrade to the paid cloud service, you get digital device apps for your iPhone and iPad together with 250GB of storage.
There is always the possibility that your external hard drive can fail and if you are using it as a backup, then you could lose valuable data if your desktop PC's drive fails as well.
Certain external drives contain more than one disk that mirror each other so that if one drive does get corrupted then the other will still contain your data.
The advantage of the cloud as mentioned is that it is accessible from anywhere in the world as long as you have an internet connection.
If you travel extensively and are looking to buy the best external hard drive for your needs, then cloud backup has got to be a serious consideration.