How To External Hard Drives Backup Your Data Files With A Portable Hard Drive For Your Computer

To understand data backup and your need for backups of your computer data on an external portable hard drive or some other means you first need to understand what is at risk. Computers have changed our lives and made more information available to more people than at any time in history. We use computers to store all sorts of information in text documents and photos, video and sound files. We store a lot of data and we like to think it will always be there and be available to us any time we need it. WARNING! It may not be.

Computers are pretty reliable these days but they can, and do, go wrong and when they do go wrong there may be no prior warning of impending doom. You could turn on your computer tomorrow and discover the screen remains black, there are none of those familiar whirring sounds as the hard disk and cooling fans stir into life. No light from the screen, no sounds, no.. nothing. The computer is dead.

Your face turns pale as the shock drains the blood from your face. Your legs feel strangely incapable of allowing you to stand. A feeling of dread is pumping through your body as you realize what this means. You have lost everything that was on your computer.

You have lost everything you have typed, recorded, bookmarked and copied onto your computer over the last couple of years or more. Everything is gone. All those family photos you enjoyed viewing, the videos of your vacation and your neighbors wedding. Business files, homework, the last picture you took of your father before he passed away. All gone. The pictures of your grandchildren, gone. Everything, gone forever.

No worries, you can always use your backups to transfer the files to a new computer. What? You didn't have backups? Oh....

I should point out that sometimes computers can be repaired and none of your data will have been lost but if the hard drive dies it is unlikely you will be able to recover anything. There are very expensive services available that may be able to recover the files off your old computer but you are probably looking at a bill of $1,000 for them to even look at it, let alone recover your data. These services are usually aimed at businesses that will pay any price to recover their data.

So, the warning should have made you appreciate what could go wrong and the solution is to prepare in case it does happen. That way you know that whatever happens you have a copy of all your important data.

It used to be hard to figure out how to copy your data and files in a way that you would be able to reuse them on another computer if that became necessary and there was always the sneaking suspicion that you might not have copied every single thing you needed but you couldn't quite be sure.

Where were the email files kept on your computer and would you be able to recover the details of passwords you need and software you purchased and installed. You probably have a lot more important files than you realize and without backups you face losing them all.

Fortunately there are some simple solutions available these days and for a fairly small investment you can easily backup your computer files and keep them safe on an external hard drive that is portable enough to slip in your pocket.

What could be easier than to plug in an external hard drive and watch as it automatically begins copying all your important files and data onto itself. No more worries about if you managed to copy everything you need as the Clickfree external drive works it all out for itself.

There are several different options available for how large a storage capacity you require to backup all your data so you need to make sure you buy a Clickfree external portable drive that has a larger capacity then the data on your current hard disk drive.

If you have a lot of video and sound files you may need a high capacity external hard drive so photographers businesses and videographers may need to look at the larger sizes such as 1TB Clickfree external drives but most of us will be just fine with a 250 GB or maybe 500 GB external drive.

Not all portable hard drives offer this plug and play backup facility so don't go assuming that they do. Go for a Clickfree external hard drive and be sure you can backup all your computer files quick and easy and avoid sleepless nights worrying what you would would do if your computer died and you lost all your files.

The manufacturers sum it up very well explaining how your external backup drive works automatically to ensure your backup will always be up to date.

"The Clickfree HD535 can automatically back up more than 400 different file types, including: Photos, Music, Video, Word, Excel, PowerPoint files, Financial data files, E-mail and E-mail attachments,Favourite websites. HD535 offers incremental backup; upon first connection it will automatically find all of the user data files and copy them to the hard drive. Each time after that, it will only back up the new files or the ones that have changed."

A superb solution to a problem many people don't even think about.A way to easily restore your lost files back to your computer or to transfer files to a new computer. We should all have one of these I think.