How to backup external hard drives

Your computer will crash. The worst part is, no one can tell when. In the highly digitized society we have today losing your entire computer data may mean your life's end-or maybe just rewriting a thesis paper all over again. But still, losing your computer memory may mean replacing and recreating everything you have in there from scratch. I don't know about you but I do not have the time nor could I possibly muster the patience to redo everything in my pc. So my advice to you is, back up your files into external hard drives.

External hard drives are basically an external safety box for all the important files in your computer. When your computer crashes, you turn to your external hard drive and pray to the heavens that your files are in there. It is just common sense to make a back up of important things, isn't it? Therefore, it is your responsibility to know how to backup your own external hard drive.

Gone were the days when hard drives were all misshapen hard disks which could only store up to 10mb. Portable external hard drives come in all shapes and sizes. These are very handy simply because they are easy to keep in your bag, and some even can be as small as a microSD memory card. What is important about these devices is mainly the size of the memory. Usually, a 320 gigabyte hard drive is enough to back up a regular computer but some people have gone on to 1 TB External hard drives which have been increasing in popularity due to its seemingly limitless potential in data storage. However, these are bulkier than other hard drives and thus are in fact less portable. The main idea though in picking a hard drive for your own is that you should pick one that has at least the same data capacity as your computer. The point is to ensure that all the data in your computer can be copied to your hard drive.

So how do you make a backup of your files?

First, you need to buy a hard drive. There are a lot out there so pick one that suits for you. Mine is a WD digital hard drive and it has saved my ass a couple of times already. I find it very reliable. Again, the point of picking a hard drive is making sure that it can contain all your computer memory so pick one that is either the same size or larger as your internal memory. I advise you buy one that is at least twice the size of your computer's memory.

Next, you need to set up a software, for example Filefort backup software, that lets you automatically back up your files onto your hard drive. Once your hard drive is connected to your computer, create three folder: daily, weekly, monthly. These will be how often your computer will be creating backups of your files.

Open the software, and set a the source to your my documents and set the destination to your hard drive. Next, set the frequency that the software will create backups of your files. Each software have different options for you like data filtering and other things so be careful to read instructions carefully.