It always baffles me when I get yet another e-mail stating “my computer crashed and I lost…” It is so much easier to backup your computer than it was even a couple of years ago. Those e-mails just tell me the person didn’t care enough about their data to make any attempt to back it up.
When you don’t back up, you’ll pay even more. A friend recently had to take their MacBook in for repairs and was charged $250 to backup the data to a drive at the repair shop. They only keep the data for a month and then delete it. Ouch, that’s pricey!
Pictured here is a Western Digital My Passport Ultra 2TB Portable External drive. I doubt many users have more than 2 TB of data that needs to be backed up so this should be more than enough. It currently sells for $109 which makes it less than half the cost of what that Mac repair shopped charged…and they didn’t even provide the data to the user for that price. I also strongly suggest you get a copy of the GoodSync utility as it makes it extremely easy to keep your data drive synched with a backup drive. Set it and forget it!
If you don’t care enough to backup your data, I won’t feel too sorry for you when it is gone.
A hard drive dock instead, will allow you to use 1 or more internal style drives for less money and 5 year warranted drives like the Western Digital Black or the better drives from other brands.
Free cloning software from Redobackup.org (for computers with 512 Meg RAM or more) or Clonezilla.org (more difficult but for less RAM) should allow you to back up your system disk.
WinRAR downloaded from ninite.com will compress your data disk, optionally break it into cd, dvd, or blueray size and also optionally add extra data security so it can restore even from a bad sector.
Don’t you hate how setting the method of publishing wipes the comments and makes one type it again.
I thought I was in good shape, with dedicated backup drives and scheduled backups, but I was wrong! Even though I had checked the backups several times after I had installed the hardware and software, I became lazy and did not check after several months of smooth sailing. BIG mistake. The last few backups did not happen and my data drive just failed. I am working extra hard to find whatever files still exist. Moral.of the story: Just because it worked yesterday, don’t presume it will work tomorrow. Verify backups on a regular basis.