The other day while waiting for my flight back to Boston, my laptop crashed. I am not sure exactly what happened but sufficient to say it is having trouble starting my Microsoft XP Pro operating system and is unable to restore to the last “good” restore point.

I have been unsuccessful in being able to restore it which really ticked me off because of the vast amount of information I stored on it. Useless information but still information I compiled over the years. So as a result of this, I am getting a new laptop.

It serves me right to share the cardinal rule for anyone who uses a computer.

ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR DATA.

Simply put, it just means making a copy of your hard drive on a separate hard drive that is not your computer itself. These type of hard drives are known as external hard drives.

It amazes me how cheap these external hard drives are in comparison to how much we pay for the hard drive itself on laptops and computers. It is fairly safe for me to stick to a $100 to $200 dollar range including shipping and taxes.

Just type external hard drives on Amazon and you will find over 400 types to choose from starting around $100 dollars. You can even get external hard drives with more than 750 Gigabytes.

So how to choose from all this?

That’s easy, all you need to know is this, it is YOUR DATA.

If you don’t know what kind of data you have, you shouldn’t even have a computer in the first place. You should be taking Intro to Computers.

I do not have a need for music or video files which can chew up bytes like ants in a sugar sack. I only have a limited amount of data that I need to preserve over time.

I am on a budget and do not have a need for 750GB external hard drive. That is overkill for me. Prices are always dropping and tera-bytes are well on their way to becoming a thing of a past in a few years time.