Giveaway: Prevent Disaster with the Stylish Samsung S2 640GB Hard Drive
Posted on July 13, 2010 by Jennifer Latkiewicz
Picture this: You find out that your email archive, contact lists, work documents, the 40,000 songs in your playlist – every file on your computer is gone. If this was to happen to you tomorrow, would you be sitting pretty with a backup plan or would your life be flashing before your eyes?
If you’re the one on the floor in a fetal position, it means you need a backup plan – NOW. Otherwise you’re just playing Russian Roulette with your data. Systems crash, upgrades fail – it happens to the best of us but total disaster can be averted relatively easily so long as your computer system is backed up.
One backup is okay but two should be the minimum. Three is even better! It may seem excessive but an ounce of prevention really is worth a pound of cure – just think of it as diversifying your data portfolio. (A few years ago, director Francis Ford Coppola lost 15 years of photographs, writings and other precious data when both his computer and backup device were stolen.) Consider a backup to your backup! To store my data, I use Time Machine, my MacBook’s default backup similar to Windows’ Backup and Restore, an online backup service called Dropbox, and an external portable hard drive, which will hopefully be enough to prevent a nervous breakdown should even two sources fail.
Online backup services are great for archiving the ‘essentials’: documents, email, contacts, financial records, browser bookmarks, etc., which can be retrieved easily and quickly. Sites like Mozy or Dropbox offers 2GB of free storage and options to upgrade for as little as $5 a month. Files are password protected and can be accessed from anywhere with an Internet connection. These services work quietly in the background and new or edited files are automatically uploaded and synced up. If you’re willing to do a bit more of the work, ADrive, offers 50GB of free storage. It doesn’t automatically update like Mozy or Dropbox so it’s best for files like music and photos that only require periodic updates.
A full-system backup is your best line of defense against data loss – a drive like the Samsung S2 640GB Portable Hard Drive has ample space for all your files and an affordable price to go with it. But regardless of the hard drive or backup method you choose, just make sure you have some sort of plan in mind.
Win your own Samsung S2 Hard Drive!
With 640GB of space, the S2 Portable Hard Drive boasts desktop-sized capacity in a stylish and streamlined package. The size of a smartphone, the S2′s 2.5-inch hard drive keeps it light and compact but packs a punch, holding up to 142,000 digital photos, 125,000 MP3 songs or 220 hours of DVD-quality movies. Luckily, the S2′s highly-rated transfer speeds makes the process less painful.
The S2 is available in a rainbow of colors including Piano Black, Snow White, Wine Red, Chocolate Brown, Sweet Pink and Ocean Blue.
Other cool features:
-SafetyKey ensures data is securely locked with password protection (PC only)
-Auto Backup function allows the user to program the default backup in real time or to a pre-arranged schedule
-Capacity Gauge give users an at-a-glance view of how much space is available, in use, or designated as backup storage
-Power Savings Program monitors the drive’s activities and goes into “sleep mode” if idle for more than five minutes
-Nonslip leather case and USB cable included
-User friendly with easy Plug & Play installation, no CD required
Enter to Win the Samsung S2 640 GB Portable Hard Drive! ($140 value)
Samsung and geekGLOSS are giving one one reader a fabulous S2 640 GB Portable Hard Drive in Ocean Blue for their own data backup. To enter the drawing, leave a comment describing a computer disaster you’ve lived to tell about.
Earn an extra entry by following @geekgloss on Twitter! Deadline is July 19 at 3pm EST. Good luck!
**UPDATE**
SomeLuckyDog is some lucky dog, indeed – she’s this week’s geekGLOSS winner! I can’t help but envy… that hard drive is totally hot! Thanks to everyone who shared their tales of woe… we all feel your pain!
Be sure to check back tomorrow to enter this week’s giveaway: a Moshi Voice Control Bluetooth for your phone. Maybe some hands-free dialing will help make those computer crises a distant memory…
(Psst. Curious how we pick a winner? All entries – including any extras – are compiled into a really boring Excel spreadsheet, in the order they were received. A random integer generator gives us a lucky number and the corresponding entry is named the winner! Just so you know that we’re not spinning in our office chairs and blindly pointing at the screen…)
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