Our increasing dependence on the digital medium ensures that not just our work but also a great deal of our personal lives revolve around our PCs and laptops. Family photographs and videos, important documents, scans, audio recordings, music, movies — everything seem to find its way onto our hard disk drives. And if you seriously think that this data is safe and secure lying tucked away in that hard disk, you’d being rather dumb. Nasty virus gremlins, mechanical failure, accidental damage through a fall, fire, floods, theft... just about anything can spell disaster for your precious data.

Be in control
The only way to secure yourself against such a calamitous eventuality is to take regular data backups. Be it online, on cloud services like Dropbox, iDrive, MozyHome, Syncplicity etc or, on CDs/DVDs. Or, on an external hard disk that you plug into your PC and copy important files onto from time to time. Of all three, external hard drives are by far the easiest and most accommodating backup solution to deploy.
Depending on capacities and capabilities, external hard drives generally cost between Rs. 3,000 to Rs. 30,000. You can buy a desktop drives that has an independent power supply and adapter. Or you can buy a portable, pocket-sized USB powered hard drive that you can easily lug around in your laptop bag with just a USB cable as an additional accompaniment.

Scores of options
While there are scores of options available, among most adaptable external data storage solutions for both PCs and Macs today is the Seagate GoFlex series. The advantage that this range of plug-and-play ultraportable and desktop drives offers is an array of interchangeable cables and desktop adapters for various types of usage. So, for example, you can use a regular USB 2.0 cable, or switch to the much faster USB 3.0 interface by merely changing the cable. Likewise, when you need to use the same hard disk to back up or transfer data to/from a Mac, you can snap in a FireWire 800 cable for speedier transfers if you so desire. You can also pick up an Auto Back cable solution for totally automated full-system backups on the same hard drive. Unlike other hard drives, the cables here need not be paired with the host controller each time the change is made. GoFlex drives are available in 320GB to 1TB capacities. The cables cost extra,.

Install and forget
If you’re in a Mac-only, or even a Mac-plus-PC environment, one of the easiest and most idiot-proof solutions around is the Apple Time Capsule. This external hard drive is geared to become a wireless storage device for your entire network. Fairly simple to install, each Time Capsule (available in 1 and 2 terabyte (TB) sizes) comes with its own inbuilt dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi base station router that operates in the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands simultaneously. The beauty of this contraption is that if you have several Macs on your network, it automatically backs up data from each machine periodically during the day — over the air, in the background. This install-once-and-forget approach saves you the bother of plugging an external hard drive into each machine individually to take backups.