I think my computer is on it’s last legs and is gonna break soon. I have a lot of pictures and songs on it. What’s the best way to back everything up. CDs, DVDs……
Hey there! That’s a question I get all the time. Don’t backup on CDs unless you absolutely have to, they simply don’t store much information these days. Many people love to get a spindle of 100 DVD’s and back everything up on those but the problem there is that once you’ve backed everything up, those DVDs are unchangeable and you have to go out and buy more.
I would recommend buying an external Hard Drive. If it’s just for backup (and not for extra storage) then either a USB or Firewire drive should do fine. What you basically want to do is plug that drive into your computer (there might be some software or instructions that came with the drive make sure you follow those) and go to your “My Computer” folder. There you will find your new drive. Open it and just drag any files you want to back up in there.
Some Hard Drives (such as Comstars) will include backup software you can set to actually keep on eye on a specific folder and automatically back it up if any changes are made (such as the addition of new photos.)
You can also backup on Internet drives but the downside is that those are slow and expensive. I wouldn’t really recommend them unless you want to have your data safe in another physical location as well.
The Fake Geek