Originally Posted by
gehenna
Hi Folks
Tying again to ask for your expertise and advice.
It's about time that I back-up everything on my PC to an external drive. Knowing little about it, it seems that a SSD device with no moving parts is probably best. I am happy to tell my PC every week or so to carry out this back-up, so nothing too hard would help!
Could you please advise which SSD's you would recommend for efficiency and reliability. Oh, I think 1TB should be sufficient, and I am running on Windows 10. My son recommends Scandisk, so your thoughts would be appreciated.
Thanks!
He probably meant SanDisk. I'd go for Samsung but I couldn't say if one is better than the other. You can be lucky or unlucky with any brand if you're only buying one.
If your data's really valuable then general policy is to have a least 2 backups and alternate them. So backup to Disk1 one week, to Disk2 the next and then Disk1 again on the third. That way if something bad happens during the backup process you don't end up copying garbage all over your only backup.
Are you wanting to back up your personal data(photos, emails, documents etc) so you could restore them to another machine or do you want to be able to rebuild the whole machine, apps and all, ie make a disk-image? That makes a difference as to how you tell your machine to do the backup.
It's also worth considering backing up to the 'cloud'. If only so you're ready to tell people who ask, why you wouldn't touch it with a bargepole.