5 External Hard Drives for a Home Backup Solution

Don’t trust cloud backup solutions?  Why not make your own storage cloud with an external USB hard drive that you can either share from a PC, or better yet if you have a router that supports USB drive attachments like the Netgear Nighthawk X6 then you can create your own personal cloud storage that stays inside your own Wi-Fi network so that none of the data exist on the public Internet.

The primary reason for doing something like this would be to backup your Internal data to an external drive for redundancy,  but also to make sure all of your devices in your house have access to the same data, like say your music library on a shared external drive or your family photo’s or backed up DVD or Blu-Ray movies for example.

Here are 5 External Hard Drives that get the job done, for my criteria I only chose External drives that were already fully enclosed HDD that were plug and play, I also only included drives that had a minimum of 2TB capacity and finally I didn’t list any product that had under a 4 Star Rating on Amazon.

WD My Book 2 TB USB 3.0 Hard Drive with Backup

The WD My Book 2TB Hard Drive with Backup supports Windows 8 and has an application to help automate backups to your external drive, it has full USB 3.0 support for the fastest transfer speeds available and supports password protection with hardware encryption. You even get Acronis True Image WD Edition system-level backup so that you can backup your entire drive to this drive.  For those who are curious, it is 256 bit hardware encryption that is used.  The drive also supports cloud backup with Dropbox too if you want cloud backup for your internal cloud backup.

Check out the WD My Book 2TB External Drive, it also comes with 4TB and 6TB capacities.

Fantom G Force 2TB USB 3.0 External Hard Drive

This Fantom G Force External Drive supports up to the USB 3 maximum bus speed of 5Gb/sec as well as comes with a 3 year limited liability.  It also has no fan so is virtually silent.  It also includes a 39″ USB cable and also comes in 3TB and 4TB capacities.

Check out the Fantom G Force 2TB USB  3.0 External Hard Drive

Toshiba Canvio Connect 2TB Portable Hard Drive

The Toshiba Canvio is more about portability and is a much smaller form factor 2TB Portable Hard Drive, it also comes in 5 colors which include: Black, Red, Blue, Silver and White.  It also comes with Backup Everything Software and supports password protected data encryption as well.

Check out the Toshiba Canvio Connect which tops out at 2TB capacity.

 

Seagate Expansion STBX2000401

 

Another small form facter 2TB USB External Drive that is quiet, tiny and just sits anywhere you put it, and it is only $89.99 the drive just works well but it does come with it’s own USB cable which uses what appears to be a proprietary style plugin port to the back of the drive, it doesn’t take standard MicroUSB or USB cables to plug into it, so if you need more cables or you lose the cable it comes with you may get frustrated at having to get another one.  This one doesn’t include full backup software or password/encryption but that isn’t necessary if you are using it as a media drive.\

Check out the Seagate Expansion STBX2000401

WD Elements 2TB USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive

Another 2TB Backup drive for $89.99 that is compact and no frills, it comes formatted NTFS for Windows but can easily be reformatted.   Note, the 2TB model is cheaper than the 1.5TB model which is a great deal.

Check out the WD Elements 2TB Portable Hard Drive.

Do you already use an external Hard Drive as a storage and backup solution for your home, feel free to share which models and your own configurations that are in place.