There have always been drives of sorts for the personal computer. In fact, early on, consumer grade computers didn't have internal hard drives! All work was done on floppy disks. Those days are long gone, but the age of the secondary drives has not faded.

Today, the external hard drive is the way to go for personal data backups!

To help from having to resort solely on downloading files from cloud storage, which can run into big bucks, I've purchased a Toshiba exactly like the one above. Mine is a one-terabyte unit and works quite well.

Your operating system (Windows or Apple) comes with backup/restore that you can use with your external drive.

It is HIGHLY recommended that you dedicate one (or more) of these devices to backups only! In my opinion these are not as resilient as the hard drive inside your computer.

Advantages:

These drives come in some pretty large sizes. I don't know how big they can be, but mine is a terabyte. It takes care of my internal hard drive in one sitting! If backing up personal files only, the drive will hold two backups!

They are "Plug 'n Play! USB-based.

They can be stored away from the computer in a fire-resistant safe box.

If properly cared for and handled carefully (don't drop it!) it will give you years of service.

They are great for moving files from one computer to another.

Operating systems prefer the use of these drives for backups.

In lieu of cloud storage, they can save $$$ if things go wrong with your internal hard drive.

Disadvantages:

They are more subject to wear and tear, being external, which is one reason why your internal drive is more resilient.

They are known to have a higher failure rate than internal drives.

Be careful that a computer you plug it into doesn't set it to "read-only" mode. This may not be a problem for most people, but either my own operating system is corrupted or I'm not doing something quite right with permissions. I have not yet been able to get one of my external drives out of this mode after plugging it into my brother's computer!

Drop it on the floor, in water, or leave it in direct sunlight or other source of heat will destroy the drive, resulting in loss of your backup on it!

They should only be used for storage and not put into regular use like you would an internal drive. They're designed for occasional use (such as backing up files,) at least in my own opinion.



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mrpeter Premium
Yes thank you for reminding us of the need to back up! One of the things I like about the Chromebook I now use pretty much all the time is the fact it saves automatically to the cloud, although I wouldn't say that if I had no Internet connection!
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Yes, this is very nice about cloud storage. The only thing I don't like about cloud storage is that it does come with a price tag, as you are renting space, albeit, if money wasn't the object, that would be my top choice.

I do use cloud storage, but in lieu of personal backups on external drives. Cloud storage provides almost top security in case personal restore of a backup becomes impossible.

It's great that cloud storage does offer scheduled backups. This is something I have never done with Amazon and I'm going to look into this, so I don't get behind with it as I have - almost five months of not backing up to cloud storage would have been disasterous if I wasn't able to successfully get all my data off the hard drive.
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mrpeter Premium
I've never paid for any but I guess I don't really need much storage as I don't have films or images I wish to keep in the cloud. Whatever the free amount is that I got when I bought the Chromebook is what I use!
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That's great when you don't have videos, etc. I have written so much over the years that I believe it amounts to about 3, or just a bit over 3 Gigabytes. It takes years to write that much!
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mrpeter Premium
It would be distressing to lose it! I have a lot of work from when I was at Uni which I'm quite precious about, but to be honest I don't actually need it and I'm sure I could live without it!
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Bennyfacter Premium
Great to remind people of this, most people only start backing up after they lose a lot of important data!
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Sounds like me! Had a bad experience in 2010 and you bet your socks I began taking backups more seriously!

I've always backed up my stuff, but there are those times when I neglected to do this important task. I actually have three hard drives to add to my list of failed ones (as I know the one I have now is on its way out.

We are all human and vulnerable to pushing things forward that need attention today, and putting things on the back burner!

My previous landlord also lost his hard drive, not to mechanical or logical failure, but of all things - total takeover by hackers, who riddled his hard drive with countless links and finally took total control of the computer to such that he could not access it!

The hard drive could be fixed, but this meant reformatting it.

Hard drives are all important vehicles for data access, but they're a dime a dozen when compared to the data that is on them!

Once a hard drive, like the one in my main computer starts acting up, even after cleaning it and reformatting, etc, I do not trust it, and time for a new one!
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Timshazz Premium
Happened to me last week. Tech dude has recovered about 80%. I'm in Vietnam so it only cost me $100. My biggest loss is emails which WA tech support suggested I back up to Outlook on my computer. I must have had a wrong setting and it it sucked all my emails out of the WA. I never got time to have a secondary back up before the failure!!! . I'm now working with Google apps for work/Google drive now so now all important stuff goes online. for 5 bucks a month it's worth it to have my emails organised from one account and important stuff backed up. I never lost much as things are backed up on various devices so now it's just time getting them reorganized. BUT it could have been a total disaster.so I'm definitely putting in a more robust process.
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Do you have a Gmail account? The great thing about Gmail is that it gives you ample space to keep your emails and not have to worry about losing them.

When I first became a member of WA, right at that time in 2010, my hard drive failed on me. Instead of beginning working on here with lessons and so forth, I spent the next couple months recovering data. Like you, I managed to retrieve about 80%. Much of it came from CD disc backups (some of which failed with the cyclical redundancy check error) and thus I have first-hand experience with relying on CDs for backup purposes!

This is a good reason why I put this Resource here. We put backups on the back burner and BAM! It hits!

Another thing we tend to do is ignore the warning signs. I did not have time to put those on here but I will probably add another page to this resource with a more concise list of warning signs.

Yet another thing we do often, is get that backup done, but then we don't do it for awhile again, even after having done a full backup, files change and new ones are added. Though we do have the backups for much of our data, the most current gets wiped when suddenly the hard drive goes into cyber oblivion.

This is what happened to me this time around, but fortunately, as of this morning, I managed to capture everything!

I have lost a couple files to damage at this point, a sound file, which is missing segments from it and a video which is still there but is corrupted.

I was of the old school, leaving my computer on all the time. We don't do that today. It's like running any machinery non-stop for five years. Hard drives and other media drives, outside of fans in a computer, are the only mechanical parts in a computer. They have bearings in them and when these begin to wear, you begin getting errors and corruption.

I like the external drive method because you can schedule your backups with it, making this one of the most trouble-free methods, but not necessarily the safest, which would be cloud storage with one of the reputable service providers.

Thanks for commenting :)
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Timshazz Premium
Now using Google Apps for work which allows me to have all my website emails coming into one account and being able to reply. It's so much more convenient and professional.
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djlv Premium
thx for the reminder!!
It's a good time for me to review this area also. i work as a songwriter & music producer and my operating basis for recording is to keep all audio & production files on an external drive which works more efficiently with the production software.. so in this situation i also need a back up of my external drive..
On a kinda related topic i just implemented the use of the WordPress plugin "UpdraftPlus Backup" to automatically do a full site backup to my Google Drive once a week.. it does make you sleep a little easier at night :~)
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I suggest you get external drives dedicated to backups only. If you are running Windows, you can set up for weekly scheduled backups (or any increments you want.)

This way, all you have to do is plug in the external drive before it's time for the scheduled backup and remove it when finished. Doing this, will allow you to have updates on your backups. It will skip any files that have not been changed in any way and only backup those that have changed.

You can also have complete backups if you have room on your external drive for at least two full backups. This ensures that, if you've gotten a corrupted file or one you've made errors on (such as a spreadsheet, or anything like that) you will more than likely have the older backup to resort to.

A corrupted file may backup as any other file would, unless it is unreadable, for which you would then get an error message about it.
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djlv Premium
good advice once again.. thx Dino :~)
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vitalyzh Premium
Nice and simple...
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Thanks. I'm glad it's coming across that way. :)
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