Ummm, this is simple beyond belief. 12 months ago I end ed up with a spare 1GB HDD trying a few types od drives to replace a failed HDD on a UK Sky PVR box. Rather than return it I wiped it and ordered a £15 nice blue HDD cady that came with it's own 5v power supply and a on/off switch at the back.

As I have now switched to a 128gb SSD drive with WIn7 64 I use my old 750GB vista drive as backup and mainly games storage. But I moved all the huge folders of photos, excel and word docs etc onto the new USB Caddy HDD.

Now as day to day I hardly need to look at these files and being a skinflint with a few ASIC mining rigs sucking electricity guess what, 95% of the time the power stich on that HDD caddy is "off". I only switch it on when I need it and it takes seconds for Windows to see it and give access.

Would be now sweat to make a second HDD caddy to make a weekly clone backup of the whole system and then switch it off when it's finished.

If cryptolocker got me, which is unlikely because I never open anything from anyone I don't know, and ask WTF is I get weird emails with attachments from those I do, then I would just reformat the HDD and restore the clone and carry one.

Lazyness and lack of IT awareness is the issue here. And i'm 45. By the time I retire the world will be a lot more IT savvy.

M