Benefits to individual external drive backup?

Question

External drive backup is about the same price as carbonite. Is there a benefit to owning the hardware for personal backup?

Answer 1

I use 3 external hard drives.

If your main hard drive (usually drive C:) crashes you will lose everything on it. If you have an external HD, everything will have a backup that can be put back onto your main HD when it is replaced or reformatted.



Two of my external HDs are backups of each other. I have lost too much data in the past, I will not again. LOL

I don't really use my main HD except for installed software. Drive C: is usually the one that gets hacked and not the external ones.



The smaller external HDs that are USB powered are also great for putting into your pocket and taking to your friends house to share data with.

Answer 2

Well, for me, I'd say the benefits are that you have your data at hand on your own personal equipment and not stored in the cloud or some remote server farm somewhere that could be hacked or go out of business suddenly.

I would never want to trust my personal files and info to be in a cloud or remote location.



Also , I'd think you might be able to put an OS on the backup drive, in case your internal one crashes and you can switch the boot sequence to the external drive.



The only benefit to a cloud storage server would be in case of a robbery or fire that would cause the loss of all my equipment.

Answer 3

I usually backup data to an external hd with aomei backupper (http://www.backup-utility.com)or backup to cloud with MultCloud

https://www.multcloud.com

Answer 4

I would say that the only benefit is that you can backup the data yourself and keep it where you wish, but at the same time they always say that it is necessary to backup in 3 or 4 places and they more the better. I backup to the external hard disks and to the cloud as well and I use Acronis True Image http://www.acronis.com/en-eu/personal/pc-backup/ to backup my data.