It isn't a matter of if you have an external hard drive failure. When you do you should be aware that there are scam companies out there waiting for you to give them a thousand dollars. Oh, they will tell you $240 but I promise you, it's more likely to be more than that. Companies like WD and Seagate should have their own data recovery entities without fearing that some drive owner will expect free service for recovery. In the last 30 years, I have had only two drive failures and both were probably caused by poor handling on my part. When this happens we are sent out to the wolves. I do back up in several places but occasionally I get lazy and that's when Mrs. Murphy shows up. Recently, I had a failure and contacted a company named Field's Data Recovery. In my opinion, they are a SCAM. I paid them almost $1,000. to recover 2,305 files in 32 folders. Lucky for me that this 3TB drive is a knock-about drive with miscellaneous images. Many of which I have backed up but I was willing to pay because I don't like to lose anything and I can afford the payment. I have received nothing from them except excuses from a very poor customer account person. I filed a dispute with my card holder, with whom I have had a flawless account with for almost 50 years, and never having filed a dispute I was assured I would get aggressive action. Be careful choosing those you do business with and backup frequently, because it will happen to you. Remember this name: Field's Data Recovery and do business with someone else.

It isn't a matter of if you have an external hard drive failure. When you do you should be aware that there are scam companies out there waiting for you to give them a thousand dollars. Oh, they will tell you $240 but I promise you, it's more likely to be more than that. Companies like WD and Seagate should have their own data recovery entities without fearing that some drive owner will expect free service for recovery. In the last 30 years, I have had only two drive failures and both were probably caused by poor handling on my part. When this happens we are sent out to the wolves. I do back up in several places but occasionally I get lazy and that's when Mrs. Murphy shows up. Recently, I had a failure and contacted a company named Field's Data Recovery. In my opinion, they are a SCAM. I paid them almost $1,000. to recover 2,305 files in 32 folders. Lucky for me that this 3TB drive is a knock-about drive with miscellaneous images. Many of which I have backed up but I was willing to pay because I don't like to lose anything and I can afford the payment. I have received nothing from them except excuses from a very poor customer account person. I filed a dispute with my card holder, with whom I have had a flawless account with for almost 50 years, and never having filed a dispute I was assured I would get aggressive action. Be careful choosing those you do business with and backup frequently, because it will happen to you. Remember this name: Field's Data Recovery and do business with someone else.

It isn't a matter of if you have an external hard drive failure. When you do you should be aware that there are scam companies out there waiting for you to give them a thousand dollars. Oh, they will tell you $240 but I promise you, it's more likely to be more than that. Companies like WD and Seagate should have their own data recovery entities without fearing that some drive owner will expect free service for recovery. In the last 30 years, I have had only two drive failures and both were probably caused by poor handling on my part. When this happens we are sent out to the wolves. I do back up in several places but occasionally I get lazy and that's when Mrs. Murphy shows up. Recently, I had a failure and contacted a company named Field's Data Recovery. In my opinion, they are a SCAM. I paid them almost $1,000. to recover 2,305 files in 32 folders. Lucky for me that this 3TB drive is a knock-about drive with miscellaneous images. Many of which I have backed up but I was willing to pay because I don't like to lose anything and I can afford the payment. I have received nothing from them except excuses from a very poor customer account person. I filed a dispute with my card holder, with whom I have had a flawless account with for almost 50 years, and never having filed a dispute I was assured I would get aggressive action. Be careful choosing those you do business with and backup frequently, because it will happen to you. Remember this name: Field's Data Recovery and do business with someone else.

UHH was not expecting to see the commas. Copy and paste the entire link into your address bar:

https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2288745,00.asp

Now give it some thought:

1. You can't get something for nothing. None of the services offer more than 5 GB of free storage.
2. There are a lot of providers listed. How long before the one you select might go bankrupt and your data becomes irretrievable?
3. The cheaper the service the less profitable it is for the provider and the more likely that they will go out of business.
4. If you have a lot of data, how long is is going to take you to back up or retrieve 1 TB of data?

The current price of a 1 TB drive is currently about $55 (2 TB about $70). I paid less than $100 each for my 1 TB drives over five years ago and they have not failed yet. If one of them fails I will probably replace it with a 2 TB drive and swap out the other two at my leisure.

My incremental backups (as I described earlier) take only a couple of minutes every three hours.

Maintaining total control of my own backups seems like a better solution than trusting a third party on the cloud.