We’ve all been there, we are working on that big proposal for our finals, we are doing the finishing touches on that big project that’s sure to get you that promotion, you are making the final edits for that customer who’s going to literally hand you a burlap bag with a money symbol – when it happens. It could be a hard drive crash, a power surge, an earthquake or a direct slap from God, I don’t know – but all your work is gone and you didn’t back it up. If you have not begun to feel that wave of icy shock and terror, then you have got to prepare- because what will you do when it *does*? I can recollect years ago, I was finishing my final project for my 2-D advert class, merely a mad old timey disinformation war poster. It was raining very heavily and the thunder was getting louder, I saved my project under a few separate titles but I would have liked to have a backup-just in case. I put my USB memory card in and did another quick save – literally a second before we had a brown out / power surge.

That second of darkness felt like a cold, numb, terrifying century. When the light came back on and my PC commenced booting up all I could do was pray that my final was there and any damage was not. My last was on my PC, one of the saves anyway. The final was still intact on my USB, but half the other files were corrupted and that port was fried and hasn’t worked since. The drive itself went two weeks later on a week after I handed in my project. I got lucky, intensely lucky. Hopefully if it occurs again I will be as lucky. But always ‘hoping for the best’ is an especially dumb thing to do. That it’s like never wearing a helmet on a bike and hoping you may never get hurt if you hopefully don’t fall-one search on YouTube proves you’ll get hurt when you fall off a bike. Hilariously though, but still I’m sure smashing your face on a concrete path hurts.

Thankfully for people that do enjoy wearing wearing helmets while using our PCs ( or making your computers clumsily wear one ), there are lots of options to be certain our files will be safe and backed up when the time comes. Online backup is great to store your files, but it can be costs and you are restrained by the velocity of your Internet and the dimensions of your data. If you’re happy to spend the scratch, it straightforward and convenient and always a comfort realizing that what ever you want should be available to you at all times-as long as a Net source in close. Which naturally it always is, I like living in THE FUTURE.

Still, if you’ve got the art of crazy coincidence and karma decides to say Sup? when you’re backing up your information online-your doubly %$+. And probably awfully short of a hug to boot. To avoid that rare disaster you can go with the classic methodology of offline data storage, the external disk drive. Prices start for as little as under 20 dollars and you should purchase one virtually anywhere, it’s truthfully one of those invests you’ll be grateful for.

Any PC with USB or Firewire capability will see the external disk drive as a storage gadget and assign it a letter to designate it. Anytime you plug it in, you basically just treat it like any standard drive. You just drag and drop what you need, it’s super simple to transfer big files backwards and forwards from work to home, to a friend’s house, or between your desktop and laptop PC. It’s especially useful if you have a tendency to keep big quantities of photos, music, movie, or game files on your computer too. Just treat your external like your attic room, toss everything in there that you do not really use or need-but your hoarder instinct is too dynamic to just remove them. This way you get to fulfill your compulsion, your computer runs quicker, and you suddenly have more room to hoard more data! Or you can use if for critical stuff like I discussed earlier, so that in an emergency your info will remain safe and secure. But I understand if that doesn’t slake your need to having floor to ceiling hard drives for your LOLcat addiction.

I work at Geek Choice, a nationwide computer service company. We can help you with: Laptop Computer Repair, Slow Computer, Virus Removal, Spyware Removal, Computer startup problems, Printer not printing, Not connecting to the Internet, and much more.