External Hard Drives A Modern Day Necessity

BACKUP STORAGE DEVICES You can backup your files on cdroms and have the files compressed to save both space and backup time. WinXP will compress folders, subfolders, and files during backup. You can purchase compression software that will do the same, saving you cdrom storage space. The compressed files are automatically uncompressed once they are restored onto your hard drive. You can also use a second hard drive as your backup storage device. We use two backup hard drives to be certain Ultimate PC Repair is up and running 24/7.

You can either purchase an internal hard drive and install it to your ide cable, or you may want to purchase an external hard drive that connects to your Universal Serial Bus or USB Port. The advantage of the external drives is that they have very large amounts of storage space, transfer data fast, and can be moved from your computer to any other computer. We use the Western Digital 170 Gigabyte External Hard Drive and we simply bounce it around to either one of our four computers with the greatest of ease. USING ONLINE BACKUP SERVICES You may also consider online services for backing up your data.

If you lose all your backup data, say due to a natural disaster such as a flood, your online data is right there waiting for you. Another advantage of online backups is that you can access, upload, or download your data from any location. It is best to use high speed internet access if you're considering online data storage. One such online backup service is Istorage located at http://www.

iomega.com/istorage and charges from $2.49 a month for 50MBs to $17.95 a month for a big 1,000MBs of storage. Or you can check out FilesAnywhere located at the url http://www.filesanywhere.

com Still another online service to try is CapSure located at http://www.capsure.com Backup your system now in one way or another if you have not done so.

If you have critical data that you simply cannot do without, take the time to invest in a backup device or one of the many online backup services. Stop and perform those backups as soon as possible. You will be thankful you did should something go wrong with your computer. It's always better to be safe than sorry.

Jeff Gross is the owner of Long Island Computer Repair, which is located on Long Island. We are Long Island's premiere source for affordable Computer Repair, Computer Networking, and Internet Marketing Services: http://www.StellarComputerSolutions.com .