Ansh Jhaveri
- Jun 23, 2019
- 2 min read

To Backup or Not To Backup

Sounds like an indecisive driver… however in this case I am speaking in terms of computer storage.

Should you back up your hard drive or not.

I recently had the circumstances where a backup came in to my aid in the most unfortunate of times.

My laptop is about 8 years old I went through college with it, my first job, and the beginning of my second job before it died on me. It just wouldn’t start up. I worked on numerous websites with it and have tons of work on it. At first it didn’t matter however when I was at work I came across something that I remembered from my previous job. So I wanted to get that document. After searching through my desktop for it I realized it must be on my laptop.

Which was now not turning on.

After being frustrated and seeing how much it would take to open the thing and get the harddrive out and connect it to my new desktop I got fed up. Then I remembered I took monthly backups on my parents hard drive.

Unfortunately, the hard drive was in new jersey and I lived in Texas. Great another set back. After being more upset thinking what the hell was the use of backing it up if I cant get to it when I need it, I remembered the back up was up on the cloud as well.

You see the way I did the backup was that the hard drive was connected to the network and I could back up my laptop without being connected to the unit. It used to do backups automatically over wifi.

So long story short remembering my old FTP, I connected to the hard drive, was able to see all my backups and was able download all of my work I needed.

As you can see if you spend just a little bit now to set up your backups maybe you will find all headache gone in the future.

Believe me getting that data was the biggest relief.

I now have a 4TB hard drive that takes monthly backups of everything. It is for my peace of mind.

In short to backup or not to backup should not a Shakespearean concept. It should be a resounding YES.

Take the backups save yourself the headache.

At the time of writing this TB hard drives are cheap. Anything under one TB is not worth getting as a backup. As drives are becoming bigger so are all file types. Due to quality and information being so important each file is becoming bigger and bigger.

Some really good 1TB backup drives:

1. Toshiba HDTB410XK3AA - $49.95

2. Seagate STGX1000400 - $44.99

3. Western Digital WDBYNN0010BBL-WESN - $79.99

Some really good 2TB backup drives:

1. Toshiba HDTTB420XK3AA - $67.99

2. Seagate STGX2000400 - $69.99

3. Western Digital WDBS4B0020BBL-WESN - $79.99

Some really good 3TB backup drives:

1. Western Digital WDBYFT0030BBL-WESN - $89.99

2. Seagate STFM30001000 - $99.99

3. Toshiba HDTB330XK3CB - $119.90