Backing Up (Part 2) - External Hard Drives

This is the backup method I recommend for most people in most situations:

Back up to an external hard drive, using specialized backup software.

That’s pretty straightforward. Let’s define almost every word in that sentence.

A hard drive is like a stack of phonograph records, except the grooves are magnetic instead of vinyl. Data is written in or read from the grooves by the equivalent of a needle that floats just above the surface of each record, or platter. The hard drive is a stack of these little platters sealed in a tiny enclosure.

If the drive resides inside your computer’s case, it is called an internal hard drive. If the drive lives outside the computer case and connects to the computer with wires, it is called an external drive.

Generally, hard drives have enough room to hold all the data in your computer.