If you own a computer and spend any time at all on it, you’ve experience at least one computer crash. It’s a frightening and frustrating ordeal, particularly if you haven’t been diligent about backing up your computer and creating a boot disk. External hard drives serve a number of crucial purposes. Here are a few.
- Backup your computers monthly on one centralized external hard drive. This will allow you to recover your documents and programs if the computer crashes. In addition, if your purchase a new computer, you can easily transfer your files from the old computer to the external drive, and subsequently transfer them from the external hard drive to the new computer.
- Use the external hard drive to store movies, music, and photos that take up a lot of room on the computer’s internal hard drive. Moving those files to the external drive will keep your computer running faster and give you more room. In addition, photos, music, and movies would be easily accessible to other family members.
- Use the external hard drive to store highly sensitive documents, such as financial information, insurance, credit card information, wills, deeds, etc. Storing these documents externally is particularly important if several people or members of a family share one computer.
- Use an external hard drive to store and run your WII programs. Running the WII games from an external hard drive, eliminates the inadvertent scratching of the discs, and makes the games easier and faster to load.
External hard drives are inexpensive and provide a level of data safety you can’t do without.