If data is your life, then you can’t afford to lose it. And who knows, at what moment your data will be get lost? So it’s always better to take a backup of your data in regular interval. You may back it up in the cloud, which is the most reliable option, as services like Dropbox and other similar services doing so well. But this may be a costly affair for many, because of those recurring fees. Also if you don’t have an awesome internet connection, then this option may suck for you.
Then the second option comes – external hard disk drives. Not just for data backup, you also use portable external hard disk drives for large amount of data transfer too. Depending upon the size of the storage, you have two broad options: self powered portable (powered by the same USB connect, which used for data transfers) and external powered non portable. Depending upon your requirement and budget, you may choose either one of these two.
So, what to do first, as soon as you opened the package and connected your new external hard disk drive to your computer? I suggest you take a backup of the softwares and files, that come with that hard disk, on your computer. External Hard Disks come with some softwares to automate backup and format the hard disk. As this is a storage device, it does not come with any CD/DVD for those softwares. Instead, you will find this on your hard disk drive. First thing you should do is to take a backup of those softwares on your computer or any other storage device.
Few months back, I bought a 2 TB Seagate external hard disk drive. It came with few bundled softwares. I installed two of them to automate the backup of my computer. I had not backed up those softwares. I thought, if required, I can easily download those softwares from Seagate website easily. And one day, that hard disk crashed. I recovered all required data, using a data recovery tool. But I did not recovered the bundled softwares, as I was overconfident that I can download those easily from Seagate website. But the process of getting those softwares from Seagate are so complex that I dropped the idea of getting those from Seagate.
Today I bought a WD Passport Essential 500 GB external HDD to use as the Time Machine Backup disk for my MacBook Pro. First thing I did after I connected it to the MacBook Pro was taking backup of those WD softwares on my computer. Then within few minutes, Time Machine formatted that HDD to use it as Time Machine Backup disk and all those bundled softwares got erased from the HDD. But I have those softwares safe on my computer and more safe in the HDD as the Time Machine backup.
So, next time when you buy a new external HDD, don’t forget to take a backup of the bundled softwares come with it. Don’t commit the similar mistake like I did.
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