Comupters, external hard drives, oh my!

[ncsudocstudent]

Hi! I need some advice from those of you who have found the ultimate comupter solutions to grad school. Here is my situation...I have a lap top that I drag around with me everywhere I go. It is nice, has all of the memory and bells and whistles that I need. I also have a desktop in my office on campus. this year, my first semester as a phd student, I worked on the laptop at home, took it with me to campus (which I should add I commute to 3-4 times a week...about a 1.5 hr. drive) and used both the laptop and the desktop at my office. I used flash drives to go back and forth between computers.

Here is the issue. This left me pretty disorganized and I dropped my laptop about 4 weeks ago. It is not a loss but it is damaged and must be sent away to be fixed now that the semester is over. This was a good lesson and is now prompting me to find a system that works for me as I go into my second year. I cannot risk a loss of data from here forward.

Suggestions are welcome. I am thinking about getting an external hard drive and carrying that between home and my office instead of the laptop. Although if I did this I would probably want to get a small notebook or something to check e-mail at other places on campus and in between. I have also considered buying space on line to store my data which would eliminate carrying anything back and forth between home and office. Any pros or cons to either of these options?

At home I plan to get a large monitor and keyboard to plug into my laptop because it is much easier to navigate since I use ESRI ArcMap a lot.

If you have found reasonable solutions to issues like these please share. My goal is to be organized, have my data in a safe place to prevent loss, and to save my back and eyes from lugging my laptop around and squinting.

Thanks!!

[lifetimestudent]

First question: Do you have a mac or pc?

Suggestion #1: Sign up for a Dropbox account. You can stop using flash drives to share files between your campus desktop & personal laptop. Plus, if you drop your computer or it is stolen, the files are backed up in the cloud. Sign up at https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTM3MDAwNjk.

Suggestion #2: Buy an external HD. They are pretty cheap these days. Check out http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=414. You can get a "better value" if you build it yourself, but the pre-built options are still a steal. $99 for 500GB? That should cover all your needs and then some.

[ncsudocstudent]

First question: Do you have a mac or pc?

Suggestion #1: Sign up for a Dropbox account. You can stop using flash drives to share files between your campus desktop & personal laptop. Plus, if you drop your computer or it is stolen, the files are backed up in the cloud. Sign up at https://www.dropbox....ls/NTM3MDAwNjk.

Suggestion #2: Buy an external HD. They are pretty cheap these days. Check out http://www.newegg.co...ubCategory=414. You can get a "better value" if you build it yourself, but the pre-built options are still a steal. $99 for 500GB? That should cover all your needs and then some.

I have a PC. Thanks for those suggestions. So, by having dropbox and an external HD I would be completely backed up.

[lifetimestudent]

Right. Of course nothing is foolproof - e.g. only the files you put in your dropbox are backed up in the cloud - but generally i only use dropbox for my current projects. My external HD holds everything i.e. all my archived files.

[rising_star]

Do you get network drive space at your university or in your department? We do and I can remotely connect to the drive from home whenever I need something from it. Otherwise, I recommend getting a netbook or iPod touch for on-the-fly email checking, using an external HD to backup everything regularly, and, if you are paranoid, backing up either to the cloud or to a second external HD that you keep in a different location.

[timuralp]

A more nerdy continuation to this, but I setup subversion in the office and make a new folder for each project. Some nice features of going this route: 1. I can go through the changes to documents, as they have been committed and revert them as I please; 2. you can integrate svn with various file managers; 3. it's easy to add/remove people from having access to the repository; 4. easy to setup on a multitude of computers and keep it synchronized. Dropbox seems to have the same features and I'm sure other things do too. Either way, this works for me and keeps my projects organized

P.S. Arguably better versioning system to check out would be git

[joro]

Awesome advice with remote storage. External hard drives really range in price. The sweet spot for a 1tb external is about $80 - $90.

[ncsudocstudent]

Awesome advice with remote storage. External hard drives really range in price. The sweet spot for a 1tb external is about $80 - $90.

Thanks for everyone's replies....a huge help.

[joro]

Also thought I'd mention that if you need more space, then you should also look into SkyDrive. They offer 25gb of free online storage space.