How to back up your data and keep it safe
My personal files were backed up onto two HDD external hard drives, and in the space of 24 hours in July, both drives failed.
Windows 10 told me that one drive wasn't working properly and kept offering to repair it, to no avail, while the other made a suspicious clicking noise and couldn't be detected by the computer at all.
External hard drives are portable storage devices that plug into PCs. There are two types - hard disk drives (HDD) that use spinning magnetic discs to store data, and newer, solid state drives (SSD) that use a chip-based flash storage technology.
I started using 1TB Western Digital HDD drives in 2015. Prior to that, I had backed up my data on my laptop and on writeable DVDs.
If my computer died, I would buy a new one, get the data recovered from the old laptop and transferred straight onto the new PC.
Yet once I started using an external hard drive, it was so easy to use that I began to depend on the technology entirely, and when I got a second drive I thought my solution was infallible.
