The second backup I suggest is off-site, or in “the cloud,” as marketing departments call it. A good rule of thumb is to get a backup drive that’s two, or even three, times the size of the drive in your computer. But even so, you need a larger drive for backups than whatever is on your PC. Incremental backups-which is how all good backup software works-save disk space by backing up only the files that have changed since the last backup. Get the largest backup drive you can afford. These slower drives are cheaper, and since the backup software runs in the background, you probably won’t notice the slower speed. One nice thing about buying a drive for backing up your data is that you don’t need to worry about drive speed. If you don’t mind a larger form factor, there’s a Western Digital 8-terabyte “desktop” version that’s not much more ( $155 at Amazon). I like this 5-terabyte model ( $110 at Amazon, $108 at Best Buy), which will back up this very article later tonight (it’s backed up to the cloud as I type, more on that in a minute). Several of us here on the Gear team have had good luck with Western Digital hard drives. In my case, the company replaced the drive without question.Įven within brand names, though, some drives are better than others. What you get by sticking with the brand names is good customer service. I had a big brand-name drive fail on me recently, and it was only four months old. That said, I suggest sticking with known names like Seagate, Western Digital, and Hitachi. Unfortunately, what really jumps out of that data is that longevity varies more by model than by manufacturer.
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