Back up that hard drive, Part 1 : Texxors.com

Back up that hard drive, Part 1

June 21, 2007 Posted by Tara in : Tips , trackback, Email this post

I was sitting at my desk yesterday, typing away, when I heard a shriek from the cube next to me. My co-worker had been experiencing a problems with her computer all morning long; it was performing much slower than normal. She said she had thought about backing up her hard drive and then BAM! Her computer crashed and everything was lost. She said it was the closest she had come to crying at work, EVER, and I understand where she is coming from. Many of the resources that I use to do my job on a daily basis are on my hard drive. Templates, reports, important contact information (this is why I am a strong supporter of web-basted contact managers).

A fast and easy way to avoid the above snafu is to back up your existing hard drive using an external hard drive. Instead of spending a tedious hour going disk by disk to back up all of your files, you can basically plug in an external drive and kick back for a while. The drives run anywhere from $130-$300 (and beyond) depending on how much space you need.

The Western Digital MyBook Premium ES Edition is a good example; it’s recommended by both CNET and PC World Magazine. It is a 500GB external hard drive that plugs into a USB port with a speed of 7200RPMs (external hard drives are not going to be as fast as your internal). They cost around $200 (give or take $30), which seems to be the average going rate for a drive of that size.

Check back tomorrow for some more tips on not loosing your data - like exactly what you should back up and how often.