Three Approaches To Contemplate Backing Up Your Hard Drive

If you take a look at historical trends, you'll notice that more people than ever are saving vital information on their computer hard drives. Loads of photos, extremely sensitive financial information, vacation plans, recipes that have been in the family for generations, and other extremely valuable data is being stored digitally on computer hard drives. Naturally, you can understand the need to back up this information on a regular basis, so you won't lose any data should something happen, but what is the best way to go about doing this? In this particular article, I'll go over three very popular and useful methods, so you'll be in a much better position to choose which one is right for you.


The most popular method is using an additional internal hard drive. Many computers these days come with two hard drives for this purpose. The data on drive C, for example, is periodically, and automatically backed up on drive D. The obvious benefit of this is that it is convenient, and requires little or no effort on your part. You just use your computer like you normally would, and that's pretty much it.

Many people are satisfied with this option. There are, however, a couple of drawbacks. For example, if your computer were to be stolen, this would obviously mean both your hard drives would be gone. This includes both copies of all your important data. Another potential problem is physical damage to your computer due to fire or flood, or some other calamity. Any damage would likely effect both drives, which could potentially destroy all your important. For this reason, many people are turning to an external hard drive.

This second option, then, is to obtain an external hard drive. These have some benefits, as well as a couple of disadvantages. The benefits are that you can keep your external hard drive separate from your main computer, which will protect against theft of physical damage. Another benefit is you can use your external hard drive for more than one computer. This can come in very handy if you are upgrading to a better machine, and want to transfer all your data. Some downsides are that they can be expensive, and they require a little bit more effort on your part to back up your data.

The third option is to back up all your data online. You sign up for many of the online services,and it you simply upload all your data to a secure server. This has the benefit of operating as if you have an additional internal hard drive, while protecting your data should anything happen to your computer.

This method does have a couple of downsides. One downside is that you'll need to pay monthly or yearly, and this can get expensive if you have plenty of data, as more storage space generally costs more money. Another obvious downside is that you'll need a fairly fast Internet connection to access your data. If you don't have a fast connection, getting access to your data can be problematic.

Of course, you aren't limited to only one of these methods. Use whichever you think is best, or any combination. The important thing is that you have some kind of back up in place to protect your data.

by: George Hutton

Article Source:
http://www.articlecity.com/articles/computers_and_internet/article_5941.shtml

I also posted this article: Are My Files Safe With Online Backup Services? 

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