Maybe it is one of the surest signs that I’m a computer geek: I find backups interesting. Not quite as interesting as cool tech gadgets, but interesting enough to be watching the increase in capacity of the largest drives as well as the portable and colorful Western Digital Passport series of hard drives with interest.
So here is BBE – Backups, Boring but Essential.

It always helps to keep your backup formats simple, for example I use True Image for drive images (full backups of a drive or partition) and the Zip format (which can be created and read by WinZip and countless other programs) for incremental daily backups. Many backup programs use the Zip format. For secure backups my preference is the RAR format. WinRAR can be found online, and can also be read by numerous utilities.

Once backups are created, they need to be copied off the computer. Here’s where external drives are the best option. I use a Western Digital My Book Essential Edition External 250GB Hard Drive for data backups and a SimpleTech SimpleDrive External 500GB Hard Drive for larger files and media files. Since I’m using Windows, I’ve formatted both of the drives to NTFS (they both came in FAT32 format), so I can store files larger than 4GB on them.

These drives meet my needs and the SimpleTech drive was on sale when I was buying, but you may find another drives more suitable to your specific needs. Reading both expert and users reviews of hard drives helps immensely. Make sure you can return a drive if you have problems. Out of three external drives purchases I have returned one and bought another drive from a different manufacturer. Also keep in mind that currently prices are falling as larger drives come out. At the moment 1 Terabyte external drives are really tempting, but they will drop in price as soon as 2 Terabyte drives become available.