An External Hard Drive: the easiest method for making a quick copy of your important stuff. Photo taken by flickr user Miss Karen
All, right, so you’ve heard it over and over and again, and you know it’s true: you need to make regular backups of your stuff. But how? What options do typical computer users have?
In the past few years, the options for preservation and backups have expanded quite a bit, giving users an enormous array of solutions to choose from. Of course, the diverse options can be confusing: what’s the best choice for you?
The backup options out there can be grouped into two major categories: local storage and cloud storage. Each has their strengths and weaknesses, and will appeal to different users based on where and how they use their computers. Some of the best and most secure backup strategies make use of both solutions… a backup-of-the-backup, so to speak. I’ll discuss that further in a later write-up.
In this article, I’ll talk about local storage. In the next article, we’ll go into cloud-based solutions.
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