Most people should expect to spend around $100 to $200. Buy from known vendors from known websites.” “All that time spent on production or in the recording studio will be wasted if your drive breaks.” According to Sean Tufts, the practice director of product security at Optiv, “Malware, ransomware, remote-access Trojans, and data-exfiltration tools are known to ride along inside these devices. Gunve, a senior postproduction manager and music-technology adjunct at the City University of New York Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema. “Do not buy the cheapest drive you can find,” warns Pontus H.W. “Redundancy is key,” says Ann Elliott Cutting, a photographer and an associate professor of photo and imaging at ArtCenter. We spoke with 13 experts about the best available external hard drives, and many insisted that you actually need a backup for your backup, either by using another drive or a cloud-based service like Google Drive or Dropbox. “She never got over it, and, frankly, neither did any of her friends.” “Regular, trustworthy backups have been a fervor of religious proportions ever since I witnessed a writer friend lose an entire screenplay on a faulty drive,” says Ross LaManna, the chair of the undergraduate and graduate film departments at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California. It just might not feel that way - until you need it. If you’re not backing up your files and photos to the cloud, an external hard drive is a necessity.
