How to back up data to an external hard drive

How to back up data to an external hard drive

Data backup has become a necessity today for every computer or mobile phone user.  With the continuous use of internet, malware attacks are common. There is a threat to your data from fire, disk failure or theft. This could lead to sudden loss of precious data for the users. Hence the need to save our crucial files and data is of utmost importance to our generation and back up is the key. There could be times that you run timely backups on your machine or Personal device but the disk fails or is lost. Therefore, we should always back up our data on an external hard drive.

Backing up data to an external hard drive is an easy to follow task that shall be carried out regularly i.e. weekly or monthly depending on the usage. The external hard drive is a small and portable hard disk drive where you can store data of large size and this can be stored for a long time for later use.

The external hard drive can be connected to your computer by using a USB cable. The hard drive can be configured when used for the first time. The drive can be named and password protection can be provided for security purposes. The hard drives come in different sizes ranging from 500 GB to 8TB or more. These have become cheaper as compared to the other back up options and these come in different USB versions. 3TB hard drives with USB3 are considered very reliable and fast where as 4TB will become better giving way to 8TB. 

The drive, once connected to the computer shall be always scanned for viruses or any malware. Once it is successfully connected, the hard drive will appear as one of the drives of your computer but in an external way. Then the data files that we want to back up can be copied and pasted at the hard drive location. You can also drag and drop the files directly to your hard drive and your files will be easily copied. It is also important to eject your hard drive carefully before removing it. This will ensure the correct functioning of your drive.

Once you back up your data on the external hard drive, it can be easily accessed at any later stage and copied back to your machine or another computer for use.