If this is your first step towards a data backup solution, first check out A Beginner’s Guide to Backing Up Data

Using an external harddrive for your computer backup storage is one of the most secure and quickest ways of ensuring your important data is safe. While it may cost a bit more up front, it will be worth the time saved if you ever had a major failure on your computer.

Set up the harddrive

Once you’ve found the right harddrive, the first step is installing it. This can be accomplished in a few ways depending on your choice, but they should all be equally simple.

1. Find a safe location to place the drive. When the harddrive is powered up, you should avoid moving it. Bumping or jarring can cause wear on harddrives and shorten their life. In the worst case scenario, a hard knock could damage the drive! The best plan is to find a sturdy, out of the way place. Be sure the cables can reach your computer and an outlet without getting in the way.
2. Plug the drive into an outlet. It needs power, of course!
3. Attach the drive to your computer.
   If you are going to be using USB, you can simply plug a USB cable into the harddrive and into the computer. If you’ve purchased a SATA drive, and your computer has a SATA port, again you should be able to simply use the enclosed SATA cable to hook up the harddrive.
4. Turn it on. If your computer was off, turn it on and wait for it to start. Turn on the harddrive. In most cases, Windows will automatically detect the device and install the driviers.
5. Format the harddrive optional In some cases you may need to format the harddrive in order for Windows to use it. You will need to refer to the manual that came with the harddrive to determine if this is needed.

Set up your backup schedule

Now it’s time to start backing stuff up! Depending on the harddrive you purchased, it may have come with software to help with this. You can choose to use this if you wish, but since I don’t know what you bought, I can’t tell if it’s any good – nor how to use it!

If you decide not to go with the manufacturer’s software, then there are a number of options for you. The simplest thing might be just to manually copy all your files – but that certainly isn’t the best way! Instead, you should checkout one of the backup-specific software packages that are available.

For free, you can try Comodo/Time Machine or SyncBack-Freeware. These are both known to be very good, although may be a bit confusing for the beginner computer user.

For a more intuitive software, check out Symantec Norton Ghost 15.0, Genie Backup Manager, or Acronis True Image

Disclaimer

Although I use Comodo/Time Machine for my own computing needs, I purchased Symantec Norton Ghost 15.0 for my mother and would highly recommend it – only $20.89 (as of 5pm, 05/20/2012)

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We’ve all heard stories from friends or family of a computer crash or a ruthless viral infection. Their woes of losing all their family photos or financial data make us worry about our own computers and the accumulation of years of pictures, documents, and other valuable files.

But where to begin? There are lots of options available, but not all of them are right for everyone. What’s right for you? After reading through this overview, click through for more details on any of the topics below.

Let’s start with some basics.

• Copying is NOT the same as a backup. What is important is where you make the copy! Copying files to a different folder on the same hard drive is virtually worthless.
• You don’t need to backup your entire computer! If you can identify just the files you consider ‘important’ you may be able to save time and money.
• Don’t count on data recover! While you may have heard about services that can recover data from a crashed hard drive, it is very expensive and results are NOT guaranteed.

There are a number of storage options for your data. Some require you to actively make your backups, as well as choose which files to back up (partial backup); others can be scheduled to run once in awhile; others are 100% automatic and copy everything (full backup).

Removable Storage

Removable storage is one of the cheapest and simplest methods of backing up your data. By ‘removable’, we simple mean that you can easily disconnect the storage device and take it with you. Depending on your needs, it may work as a full or partial backup. Three main methods of removable storage are

• flash or ‘thumb’ drives
• external hard drives
• optical media (cd/dvd)

Flash Drives

‘Flash’ drives are the little devices that you can plug into a USB slot on your computer, usually no installation needed. These drives are getting cheaper all the time. You can get a 32GB or 64GB drive very cheaply. They are small, and they are portable. These should not be used as long-term storage, as they are known to become corrupted over time (or get lost!)

External Hard Drives

Bu purchasing a hard drive enclosure and a new hard drive, you can backup the entire contents of your computer. This can become pricey if you plan to backup everything on your computer since you will need to buy a hard drive that is at least as big as the one in your computer. On the other hand, it is a very dependable method of storage that requires relatively little setup.

Optical Media

This would be best suited to a small business or someone who wants to make periodic backups of a small amount of data and take those backups to a different, safe location (in case of a fire, for example). Since a CD can only hold around 750MB, and a DVD only 4.5GB (4500 MB), you likely won’t be backing up your entire computer.

Internet Backups

There are various internet services that allow you to upload your data to their servers for a fee. For example, if you’ve watched any tv or listened to the radio in the last few years, you’ve probably heard of Carbonite – although it is only one of many options.

One downside to Internet backups is that you often may have sensitive personal data you need to store. In this case, be sure to check if the data is encrypted and secure -both during the backup process itself, and while it is stored on the company’s servers. If you have lots of data to store, it may take a long, long time to initially store your data. However, after the initial backup procedure, only new files or changes to files need to be uploaded and stored – a much quicker operation.

As for cost, this is often a cheap way to get going with backups. However, since there is usually a monthly subscription, after 2 or 3 years you will have paid more than if you had purchased a large, reliable, external hard drive and managed things yourself. Also beware of upgrades that add little value (Don’t upgrade to the premium Carbonite package, for example, which only adds support for external hard drive backing up – you can do that yourself with various computer backup software)

SATA is simply one of a number of ways in which a hard drive connects to the computer. You can think of it as the plug or the wire. That’s not entirely accurate – really there is much more to it – but unless you are deep into the technical field (in which case you already know what SATA is), it’s close enough.

‘SATA’ – or ‘Serial ATA’ – stands for Serial Advanced Technology Attachment. This is probably not helpful information. But if you are ever playing a tech-edition of Trivial Persuit maybe it will come in handy.

What people want to know when they are buying a new hard drive is does it matter if they get SATA or not? The answer is, yes!

Yes is the answer because you need to get a drive that is compatible with your computer. When you are shopping for a hard drive, you need to know what kind of connection (or “interface”) your computer uses to talk to its hard drive/s. Other types of labels you may have seen include “PATA”, “IDE”, “EIDE”, “SAS”, or “SCSI”.

In case you are curious about that list, here’s a short version of how it breaks down:

ATA/IDE/EIDE

• all basically the same thing. For over 15 years this was the industry standard for hard drives (and still is used for cd/dvd rom drives). Sometimes it’s also called ‘PATA’ to keep it seperate from ‘SATA’, because engineers think that more words makes things less confusing. We like them anyway. The engineers, that is.
• max speed 133 MB/s

SATA

• slowly replacing IDE/PATA as the new industry standard
• latest version of SATA can reach over 3000 MB/s (that’s three thousand, not a typo)

SCSI

• pronounced ‘scuzzy’ (but really they are very clean)
• much faster than IDE drives, but generally much more expensive
• mainly used by large businesses and geeks

SAS

• Serial Attached SCSI
• super fast, and is compatible with SATA devices

If your computer is 5 years old or less, it likely has support for SATA hard drives. It may even have support for both SATA and IDE drives. If you aren’t sure, you need to look at your computer manual (haha, just kidding, they don’t give you those anymore) Depending on what kind of computer you have, you may be able to simply go to your favorite search engine and type in the model-number and ‘replacement hard drive’ to discover the answer.

When you are looking for an external hard drive for backing up data, you usually can choose whatever hard drive you want – but a SATA external drive could be one of the fastest options. Beware: to take full advantage of the speed requires that you have a computer that lets you hook up to a SATA port (again, if you aren’t sure go to the seach engine and try to find out more about your computer)

Many external drives allow you to hook up using USB – and you can certainly go that route. But, it is a far, far slower connection. Depending on the situation, a direct SATA connection could transfer data in less than half the time. Since SATA are often a bit pricier than their IDE/PATA counterparts, if you don’t have a SATA port you might save a bit of money and go IDE/PATA.