Key Takeaways
• 100% of harddrives fail.
• Setup a repeating calendar reminder for your regular backups.
• Buy new drives every 2-5 years.
Harddrives
I recommend going with the Western Digital “portable” harddrives. I’d go with a 1TB or 2TB (1 terabyte = 1,000 gigabytes). You may need more. You may need less. It depends on your lifestyle, your business, your info, etc.
Here are the links to the products that I use and you saw in the video.
Western Digital My Passport Essential – (1 TB)
Western Digital My Passport – (2 TB)
Harddrive Carrying Cases
Western Digital My Passport Carrying Case – (Soft)
Case Logic Portable EVA Hard Drive Case – (Regular)
Western Digital WD Nomad Rugged Case – (Durable)
Fireproof & Waterproof Safe
SentrySafe H2300 Fire-Safe & Waterproof Chest – (0.36 Cubic Foot)
Properly Formatting Your New Harddrives
Click below to watch a video where I show you how to format a harddrive (MAC users only) for MS-DOS FAT32.
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Bonus Video
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If You Are a Windows User
1. Why haven’t you switched to a MAC?
2. Sorry I don’t have a video tutorial for you – try these videos on how to properly format your harddrive.
Note: all the drives I mentioned above work on both a Windows and a Mac machine.
Common Excuses for Not Backing Up Data (don’t make these!)
• “I’m too busy.”
My reply: Bullshit!
• “I don’t know how.”
My reply: I just showed you.
• “My computer won’t crash.”
My reply: Dude, you don’t know what’s will happen tomorrow.
• “It’s expensive!” (the dumbest excuse)
My reply: Realize the real costs man. It’s like stupid people claiming that’s expensive to eat healthy. No, it’s actually not. What’s expensive is being 60 years old, unable to work, with medical bills out the wazoo.
We’re humans and sometimes we’re dumb. We can’t grasp long-term benefits very easily & we only think very short-term.
Adopt a long-term strategy for success as well as a more light, manageable scalable, minimalistic and safe – and backup your shit man!
“Yea Matt, Sounds Good and All, But Do I Really Need To?”
Yes, dumb ass – you do.
I don’t care if you follow my method or not, but you should definitely back your shit up!
All Kidding Aside ;)
I hope the information & video above are helpful for you!
Leverage technology & design your ideal digital lifestyle!
5 Comments
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November 21, 2012 at 10:57 amManish Suwal 'Enwil'
November 22, 2012 at 10:55 pmDo you encrypt your files to your external hard drive or not?
Do you use it just for backup or to keep all your data?
I am out of space on my laptop so I’m thinking of buying a 1TB external hard drive but not sure how to use it.
Is zipping and backing up a good idea or just copy pasting?
External Hard drive might also crash, so I guess we’re not 100% safe.
Matt Horwitz
November 22, 2012 at 11:33 pmHey Manish! Encryption would be a good idea. I don’t do that right now. Do you have a video tutorial you know of that shows how to do that on a mac?
I use the external drive for both keeping all my data and backing it up. I look at it like this… if someone steals my computer, or it breaks, I still have my data on my external harddrive. I have 2 drives. One “main” drive, and one “backup”. Once a month I delete all the contents on the backup drive and copy and paste the main drive to it. I don’t do a zip.
I keep the backup in a safe (I need to get a waterproof and fireproof one).
If I really wanted to be safe, I could 1 “main” drive, and 2 “backups”. I could also put data in the could, but I have over 1.5TB currently.
Let me know if you have any other questions man.
Manish Suwal 'Enwil'
November 23, 2012 at 12:10 am//Do you have a video tutorial you know of that shows how to do that on a mac?//
Here’s the video tutorial for encription: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xphofefZqg
This is by far the best tutorial I’ve found for encrypting data in Mac. There’s a link in the description of the video to download TrueCrypt the software to encrypt data.
//I use the external drive for both keeping all my data and backing it up.//
What do you mean by backing up? Previously you said that you just copy paste everything to your external hard drive. Did you mean the same thing by backing up?
The problem for me is that I don’t have any hard disk space left on my laptop so I’ll be using external hard drive as space extender i.e. to keep all the files which doesn’t fit in my laptop.
So if my external hard drive gets lots then I’m screwed because I don’t have it’s backup.
Matt Horwitz
November 23, 2012 at 12:25 amGreat video! Thanks!
Yes, sorry… by backing up, I mean copy and paste. I keep all of my information on one external harddrive and once a month I copy and paste everything to another external harddrive. I don’t keep any files on my machine in case it is ever lost, stolen, or damaged.
You’ll need to get 2 external drives. One to keep all the files, and another to copy and paste everything to for your “backup”. Hope that makes sense :)