I know you don’t backup your computer often or at all. There may be a couple of you who have regular backups, but you are a rare breed. Today we’re going to look at external hard drives that can help you keep your data safe or to simply be a place to store more data. I’ll give you some links to Amazon for which I receive a few pennies if you buy something. Unfortunately they didn’t send me any free drives to use.

The box I’ve pictured is a 1 TB Seagate drive that connects via USB 3.0. That means the data travels fast as long as you have a USB 3.0 port on your computer. From a size standpoint, 1 TB may not be large enough if you have a lot of data. There are also 2 TB, 3 TB and 4 TB versions of the drive. Based on current prices, the 3 TB drive is the worst value and the 4 TB is the best.

A very smart backup strategy would be to have at least two different drives. Each time you make a backup, take that drive and put it somewhere safe. That way if disaster strikes, the backup is offsite. Swap the two drives back and forth to make sure they are never in the same place. I’ve recommended GoodSync a number of times as my software of choice for backing up data. Put GoodSync together with one of the Seagate drives and you have a good solution for keeping your data safe.