Save it or Lose it! Please Save Those Puppies!!!

Save those Puppies! Especially now that we are in exams and your computer is REALLY needed!

And music and pictures and videos and documents...

Are you backing up your stuff? Your computer can hold many gigabytes(GB) of data. Some folks just keep downloading and creating, but never save their stuff so if their computer gets a bad virus or just crashes, they lose it all.

Save yourself the headaches and buy an external hard drive to copy your music and "goodies" to.

Seagate makes a good product. I have had varying experiences with Verbatim and Maxtor. I cannot speak to other manufacturers. Check ZDnet or Cnet for reviews. Not to mention Amazon.com.

You can get a good 500GB external hard drive at Office Depot for as low as $70, depending on the sales at the time. Or a larger capacity drive for not a lot more.

These days you only need to get one that connects by USB 2.0. They will charge you more for one that connects with USB 3.0. It won't hurt to use 3.0 on your computer. You just won't get any faster speeds. UNLESS you have 3.0 USB ports on your machine.

Mac users should use the Time Machine backup program. It will save an entire image of your hard drive and if your computer disappears into Narnia, you can reload your stuff onto another MacBook and it will be (almost) exactly the same as the old machine.

Note: You cannot use the same external drive to backup a Windows machine AND a Mac. You would need separate drives because the two operating systems write data differently.

Save yourself the sadness of losing your huge and expensive iTunes collection, not to mention all of those pictures. We had a student who had shot over 40GB of school pictures, including the big Air Show and she lost most of it when her computer was set down on a magnet. Yup, it is just that easy to lose it all!

Can't say I didn't warn you...