For those of you who have seen/heard me speak about the benefits of a chartless office, you've also had the chance to hear my crazy anal retentive backup strategy. Because portable hard drives just keep getting larger in capacity and smaller in price, there is just no viable argument against using them.
They are quick, efficient, affordable, reliable, and very easy to use. My life, both in my office and in my home, revolves around a variety of these devices andI don't think I could function without them.
The purpose of this post is to highlight the affordability of these drives. According the Sam's Club website, they currently feature a Western Digital My Book Essential 2TB drive (that's right, two terabytes!!!) for 128.88
About 3 years ago I purchased a similar device that had 300GB for roughly $25 more. That means you can now buy about 600% more drive space for $25 less. That is nothing short of amazing.
Unless you are doing a lot more storage in your office than I am (and I don't really think that is too possible or practical) a 2TB drive should fit your needs nicely. Simply get one for each day of the week or each week of the month and you are good to go.
While I'm also a fan of online backups, downloading multiple gigabytes of data, even over a highspeed connection, can take a long time. We're talking many hours at best and perhaps days for online backups as opposed to single digit hours of recreating from a portable hard drive or even less, if you can just plug it in and use it on your system. Online backups are fine and recommended, but only as a redundant system to the portable hard drive system I've outlined here.
