{"id":637,"date":"2014-11-25T06:35:15","date_gmt":"2014-11-25T06:35:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rockblotter.com\/DijaKnowThat\/?p=637"},"modified":"2014-11-27T04:25:38","modified_gmt":"2014-11-27T04:25:38","slug":"do-you-have-a-backup-of-your-dataphotos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rockblotter.com\/DijaKnowThat\/do-you-have-a-backup-of-your-dataphotos\/","title":{"rendered":"Backing Up Your PC\u2014Part 1: Where?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Each of us save a large amount of data in the form of files and photos to our PCs, much of which we\u2019d hate to lose \u2026 a daughter\u2019s wedding, the birth of a new addition to the family, the annual tax files, your mail, your contacts.\u00a0 And PCs aren\u2019t infallible.\u00a0 Sectors on a hard drive can go bad or an entire hard drive can fail.\u00a0 You can click on a link in an email sent to you from what looks to be your trusted friend, only to find out it wasn\u2019t and now, your PC is no longer playing nice.\u00a0 That\u2019s why it\u2019s extremely important to maintain backups of your files that are easily accessible and on a stored on a different drive than the one on which they\u2019re currently stored.<\/span><\/p>\n

If you have only one drive in your PC, there are two things you\u2019ll need to consider for your back up: (1) WHERE<\/strong> are you going to store your back up files and (2) HOW<\/strong> are you going to connect that storage device to your PC.<\/span><\/p>\n

1 – Where Are you Going to Store Your Backup?<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

I\"\"f you bought yourself a more expensive workstation, you may have more than one internal hard drive, and you\u2019re in great shape.\u00a0 If you bought a \u201cdeal\u201d at your local Walmart, more than likely you\u2019ve got only ONE internal drive.\u00a0\u00a0 It may have been deal at the time, but typically, those cheap PCs from Walmart have\u00a0 no place inside to plug in another internal hard drive. Similarly, if you have a Laptop, it\u2019s not likely you\u2019ll be able to easily plug in a second internal hard drive.\u00a0\u00a0 So, the first thing you need to do is buy yourself an external hard drive.\u00a0 But what kind, and how big?<\/span><\/p>\n

A good rule of thumb when looking for an external USB drive is to buy one that at a minimum, has at least twice the capacity of your \u201cC\u201d drive.\u00a0 So \u2014 how big is your hard drive?\u00a0 One way you can find that out is to open the Properties panel for your \u201cC\u201d drive.\u00a0 To do that, hold down the windows key (usually found in the lower left corner of your keyboard, next to the CTRL key) and while you\u2019re holding that windows key down, press and release the E key to open a 2-pane Windows Explorer window.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the left hand pane, navigate to the \u201cC\u201d drive in the list and RIGHT-click on it and select \u201cProperties\u201d\u00a0 (usually at the bottom of the list) to open a property panel similar to the one at the right.\u00a0 In this example, the drive is 111 GB in size.\u00a0 Thus, we could get by with a 250GB drive for our backup, but you could most like purchase a 500GB\u00a0 or a 1TB external USB drive on sale this upcoming holiday season for the same price or lesser price than a 250GB drive.<\/span><\/p>\n

2 \u2013 What type of External Hard Drive Should I purchase?<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"Okay, so let\u2019s say your laptop or desktop PC doesn\u2019t have that essential second internal hard drive on which to store your backups.\u00a0 Our next step is to decide what type of external drive we need to buy \u2014 USB2 or USB3.\u00a0 USB2 drives can be plugged into either a USB2 or a USB3 port and work,\u00a0because\u00a0USB3 ports are what’s called: \u201cdownward compatible.”\u00a0What that means is,\u00a0USB3 ports can pass information from USB2 devices. If you find a great deal on and purchase a\u00a0USB3 device, you can only\u00a0plug that into a USB3 port.\u00a0 So how do you know which ports you have?<\/span><\/p>\n

If you have an older PC\/laptop, you may just have USB2 ports.\u00a0 If you have a not-so-old PC\/laptop, you may have both \u2014 at least one USB2 port and one USB3 port.\u00a0 If you have a relatively new PC or laptop, you may have only USB3 ports.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Once you know which type of USB connection your particular PC has, you\u2019re ready to go shopping and find the best deal for the size drive you’ll need to store at least two backups of your system drive. \u00a0There will be quite a few good deals to be had this holiday season.\u00a0 Just make sure the external storage drive you decide to purchase is one that will work with your PC or laptop.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Each of us save a large amount of data in the form of files and photos to our PCs, much of which we\u2019d hate to lose \u2026 a daughter\u2019s wedding, the birth of a new addition to the family, the annual tax files, your mail, your contacts.\u00a0 And PCs aren\u2019t infallible.\u00a0 Sectors on a hard […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":636,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[82,70,71],"class_list":["post-637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-backup","tag-backup","tag-usb2","tag-usb3"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rockblotter.com\/DijaKnowThat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rockblotter.com\/DijaKnowThat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rockblotter.com\/DijaKnowThat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rockblotter.com\/DijaKnowThat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rockblotter.com\/DijaKnowThat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=637"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.rockblotter.com\/DijaKnowThat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":644,"href":"https:\/\/www.rockblotter.com\/DijaKnowThat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637\/revisions\/644"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rockblotter.com\/DijaKnowThat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rockblotter.com\/DijaKnowThat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rockblotter.com\/DijaKnowThat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rockblotter.com\/DijaKnowThat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}