I need a larger external hard drive to back up to my PC. I was thinking of 1TB. As I use a desk top, it wouldn't necessarily have to be portable, but there again a portable one would take up less room on my desk.

Are there any benefits to getting a larger form external hard drive to one really designed to be more for laptop use does anyone know?

I am also a little confused as to the merits of using any accompanying software. The external drive I have used to date is a Western Digital but I just manually saved whatever files I wanted on it rather than using any software. Sometimes everything went smoothly doing a 'save' this way, other times even though I performed the same task the same way, it didn't save all the files & I needed to repeat the process. This meant that each time I performed a backup I have needed to check through several files to ensure that all necessary data is actually there. I could do with a bit of guidance really as to what might be a good choice for me and would appreciate any assistance anyone can offer. Thanks.