Hi everybody, today we are going to talk about the benefits of owning an external hard drive. There are many options you can use for backups but my favorite is by far the external drive.

External hard drives come in all sizes and colors. You can get almost any color you want to match your desk or any other décor you might want to match up. In addition to colors, you can get drives that attach locally through a USB port or you can get a drive that connects directly through your router and can act as an entire network drive for all your computers. Either way, it is the ultimate way to save all your important files.

The first type we are going to talk about is the USB local drive. This is by far the most commonly used and the most practical for most people. This is a great option if you have one computer and you want a place to store all your favorite movies and music. It is a must if you have I Tunes as you can backup all your favorite music to be sure it is not lost if you should encounter a computer crash. Before you make your purchase, you need to decide how much space you need. The drives come anywhere from 250 MB all the way to several Terabytes. Let me put this into prospective. 100 megabytes equals I Gigabyte. 1000 Gigabytes equals 1 Terabyte. A large picture from a good camera can be up to 5 Megs or more and a music file can be 25 Megs or even higher depending on the length and the quality it was recorded at. This might give you a guide as to how much space you will need to store your files.

The second type of drive I would like to talk about is the external network drive. The mechanics of this drive are about the same with the exception that the drive connects through your router instead of a local computer. The drive will be able to be accessed by all computers on the network instead of just on one computer. This is great if you have several computers and they all need files backed up. You can create a folder for each computer on the network so make organizing your files easier. If you go this route, you will want to get a drive as large as you can afford, probably in the order of at least a terabyte if not more.

As you can see, having an external hard drive (or two) can really make sense and should be part of a routine backup program.

Author:  Joe Zelenak, Staff Writer