Help, I'm not a techie but need advice

[Cheng]

I have a lot of video and photos on my laptop. What is the best way to back them up? I heard that if you burn them on CD, they degrade over time. Thanks for your help.

 

[jaredwb]

I have a lot of video and photos on my laptop. What is the best way to back them up? I heard that if you burn them on CD, they degrade over time. Thanks for your help.

I'd suggest buying a small external hard drive. Seagate and Western Digital are the best brands and offer different sizes. With Photo and Video, make sure to get a lot of memory.

Also, you might want to try out some of the online storage sites. I use DropBox but there are many.

 

[clooz]

I second jaredw's advice. I've used Western Digital 1 Terabyte external drives as backup for several years now. After getting a drive, the next thing you need to do, is decide on which backup software to make your backups with. These external drives come with backup software usually. Try that software first to see if it works for you.

After you make your first backup of everything on your laptop, you'll want to run a differential backup of changes ideally once a week at least. If the time it takes to make the differential backup is inconveniently long, say more than 30 minutes or an hour, investigate buying backup software. Real backup software (such as Retrospect v. 6 for Mac) is incredibly fast and reliable. Don't use any of the free or shareware backup programs - they are not reliable when you need them to be.

 

[Sleuth]

You should definitely also look at online backup services like Carbonite and Mozy. I use both an external hard drive (TimeMachine for Mac) and an online service. The $59/year for Carbonite is a great deal for all your memories.

Remember, if your apartment burns to the ground, your computer and external drive are both gone.