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Ever had a computer crash and lost everything? Working from home and don’t have access to the corporate backup service? It’s a good idea to back up your files on a regular basis. What does that mean? It means copying your files onto an outside source. Here’s a few options to backup your PC or laptop - and avoid a personal melt down when and if your computer goes belly up.
External Mega Drive: For the heavy PC user with lots and lots of data. The capacity you will need will depend on the size of your files. Whether it’s an 80GB or 500GB, this is one that will grow with you.
Jump Drive: These are small little cards, and generally are great for a home PC. Generally they run 1-4GB, and are small enough to fit in your pocket (think the size of a small pen or MP3 player). These start at around $20 each.
Store Everything On An External Drive: I recently spoke with a graphic artist who stores nothing on his laptop or desktop. Zilch, nada, nothing. He had experience crashes and lost everything, so he chooses to use an external drive 100% of the time. This would need to be considerably large to hold everything (100GB and up would be best) Just be sure to back that one up as well!
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Just a warning for external drives…
We were using an external drive to store all our 5 years worth of digital pictures… DH is quite a photographer, so he was quite panicked when the external drive stopped working (it was less than a year old). We don’t back up the pictures regularly enough, (we do back up our other data weekly,) so we would have lost several months worth of pictures.
Warranties do nothing to replace the value of lost pictures or data… sending it in for repair meant realizing that they probably would format the drive (erasing all content) in effort to restore its functionality!
Fortunately, DH is also a computer expert, so he took the drive apart himself (voiding the warranty!) and installed it internally in the computer and it works fine… no pictures lost!
Apparently it was the power source that had gone bad… so for that graphic artist… make sure you are regularly backing up that external drive as well!
Check out my blog for more details about backing up…but whatevr you do, BACK UP!
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