5 easy ways to protect your data on ‘World Backup Day'
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Loading... - Nathan Brooks
- 01 Apr 2022
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Now that your world has become increasingly digitalized – from photos and videos to music and podcasts to videogames and ebooks – it’s no surprise you’re running out of storage on your devices.
How are you backing up all your important files?
Not only does backing up allow you to free space on, say, a laptop or tablet; you’re also protecting these files from threats such as a nasty virus, damaging power surge, theft, fire or flood, and so on.
It could be particularly distressing to lose years’ worth of irreplaceable photos and home movies, or work-related documents.
You know the adage: You don’t know what you got until it’s gone. What better time than World Backup Day, March 31, to safeguard your files?
We have many affordable ways to do it, and you don’t need a degree in computer engineering to pull it off.
Focusing on laptops and desktops, the following are five solutions and the pros and cons for each.
External hard drive
If you have a lot of files, an external hard disc drive (HDD) is for you.
Pick up a 2 terabyte (2TB) external drive (roughly 2,000 gigabytes) for as low as $59 for the WD Easystore or the Seagate Portable. That’s a lot of bang for the buck, from big names in this space.
An external hard drive is ideal for media such as videos, which can be huge files.
Some are “portable” drives, such as the above-mentioned models, which means they’re smaller and draw power from the computer’s USB port. Others are “desktop” drives, which are meant for stationary use and require an AC outlet.
Some drives are called NAS (network attached storage), which plug into your router or modem or join via Wi-Fi, kind of like your own private cloud.
Hard drives are great for large files, but they’re not as fast as solid-state drives (see below), and they could die over time, so it’s key to have duplicates or triplicates of these external drives – and keep them somewhere other than near your PC. Why? In the event of a fire or flood, the backups could be destroyed along with the original.
Solid-state drive (SSD)
A solid-state drive (SSD) offers several benefits over a hard drive.
For one, SSDs are much faster when saving information to the drive, as well as accessing data from it. Part of this reason is the fact SSDs do not have any moving parts, opposed to spinning magnetic platters inside hard drives.
Because SSDs have no moving parts, they’re much quieter to run than a hard drive. Solid-state drives are much smaller and lighter and don’t require as much power, which translates to better battery life on a laptop between charges.
SSDs are more durable and less prone to damage than HDDs, which is key if you’re on the go, such as on vacation, when you back up your captured images.
SSDs tend to cost more than a hard drive yet don’t hold as many files.
Recommended: My Passport SSD from WD starts at $105 for 500 GB and goes up to 4TB ($449). Connect it to a PC or Mac via USB 3.0, for data transfer speeds up to 1,050MB/second. They’re shock- and vibration-resistant and drop-resistant up to 6.5 feet. Read More…
