Backup Your Hard Drive with an External Storage Device

Written by Daniel Jones

New Technology to Backup Your Hard Drive

A decade ago, to backup your hard drive meant having a large stack of floppy disks. Even with duplicate and sometimes triplicate copies we often ended up with lost data. When Iomega released the 100 Meg ZIP drive we could suddenly able to backup large portions of our hard drive with less pain, relative reliability, and best of all we could get the version that plugged into our parallel port and it was almost portable.

Of course we needed to bring along a floppy disk to install the drivers, and it was painfully slow, even with the parallel port set up correctly. This continues to be an even larger problem as hard drives and backup media get larger.

Plug in Hard Drive Backups

Just in time are a number of hard drive backup solutions that practically plug and play. Taking advantage of the USB 2.0 standard some of these solutions are not just hard drive backup solutions, but are approaching usefulness as hard drives in their own right. This is especially true when they take advantage of the lightning speeds of Fire Wire. Additional many of these external storage solutions do not require drivers aside from what they install themselves.

Assuming you have a current operating system you can usually be up and running seconds after plugging the hardware in. No more unplugging the printer to get at a parallel port, or worse trying to get your printer software to find the printer after passing through a storage device.

Backups Using an External Hard Drive Kit

Perhaps the coolest new option, for the more technically oriented, is the external hard drive kit. With this kit you can theoretically take any stock hard drive, and install it the small box provided. Once you've done this you can plug the box into your computer with either USB 2.0 or Fire Wire (depending on the kit) and you have an instant external hard drive to backup to.

The great thing about these systems is that you can continue to expand the size of your backup hard drive as the technology for hard drives improves. No longer do you have problems with your storage device not keeping up with the size of your new computers larger hard drive. The disadvantage is that your backup drive often requires it's own power source, as it can't pull sufficient power from the USB/Fire Wire connection.

Also the software making the connection often is not able to deal with the latest in hard drive sizes and speeds. This is usually take care of with additional driver releases, but you may be out of luck for as much as several months. My favorite technique is to take my old hard drive out of my Desktop and use it to backup my laptop's smaller hard drive.