I’m just saying… please backup your computer…
This is a public service announcement! 🙂
You can use online service or local external harddrive, please please backup your computer.
Since so many of us are working from home, you may be relying on your home computer. And often, unlike your office computer, you may not have a backup to be setup…
Either you use Mac or PC, operating systems have a basic backup feature. File History for the PC and Time Machine for Mac. NEITHER of them would do anything without you have external storage space!
I usually recommend just buying a cheap external harddrive, something like 1TB, and use it ONLY for your computer backup.
Something like this WesternDigital 1TB Ext. Drive (https://amzn.to/3expK23) would be plenty of space for your work related documents, and probably enough for most pictures. If you are huge photographer or video taker, you may want to get larger drive, but even 2TB drives are not that expensive…
I suggest buying a cheap spinning disk drive instead of super fast SSD for the backup. If you are only using it for a backup, speed isn’t critical, and when it goes bad (or start showing the sign of going bad) you can just buy another cheap one.
If you are looking for an Ext. Drive to expand your disk space, definitely go for SSD. It is more expensive, but if you are saving data that you need to access often, the speed is the key.
I currently use this External SSD Drive (https://amzn.to/3aiGBCC) and I’m very happy with it.
Just remember though, anything you save on external drive, you have to backup them up as well! I have majority of my pictures saved on my external drives. I have 2 external drives with exact same set of pictures, so just in case, if one goes bad, I have a backup. To keep them safe, I usually keep on at my hose and another in my office.
If you opt to use Online backup service, look into the details like how easy it is to get the data recovered when you need to.
Using Dropbox or Google Drive is a good idea, but always keep a copy elsewhere as well. The whole idea is to have minimum of 2 identical datasets at given time, so if one goes down, you can get it back from the other.
I use iCloud for my phone. Subscribing for a $1/month plan, and I can forget about my phone backup is well worth the convenience, and I suggest any iPhone users that. We take way too many pictures on our phone, and we can’t just loose them…
Anyhow… do your backup!
