Forgive the "yelling", but I'm just now recovering what I can after a complete hard drive failure.

I don't care what service you use, but do yourself a favor and back your computer up with an "off-site" service (I had the data backed up but if the hard drive itself fails you lose everything, regardless).

It's not expensive and it's not overly time-consuming to do, and if you think of all the things you have on your 'puter that do don't want to lose--kids' pictures, music files, etc.--it's something you'd be hard-pressed to find a reason NOT to do.

Just sayin'...

 

I found that one out the hard way , I had a hard drive fail along with a old motherboard / video card that took a dump ... of course not all at the same time so I had to reload windows like 10 times ! I'm pretty good at it now , it takes like half a day literally with all the updates , so yes its a good idea to back it up.

 

I work in the Chicagoland master feed for telecommunications. (Comcast)
I work with billions in servers, routers, flash drives, HDD's, you name it.

Hard Drives fail.....period.
So naturally they are not the best way to store very important data as your only backup.
Believe it or not, our main data servers for our video system still use magnetic media backup tapes daily.

First thing I learned in 1999 with my A+ PC tech training......
The C: drive is only used for the OS and supporting software.
You partition any single drive into AT LEAST 2 logical drives, one for the OS and the other for storage.
You never EVER store anything on the C: drive......bad habit to get into.

But the smart thing to do is have multiple HDD's , either internal or external.
My important data is backed up to an External HDD that' never turned on unless I'm backing up to it.
But the real important stuff like photo's and video's of the family is also backed up to hard media like BluRay discs or Compact Discs.

Those can't be ruined if stored properly and don't fail. Food for thought. BluRay burners are VERY cheap these days.
You can't beat 50GB storage per disc.

 

there ya go ... I should have a back up hard drive on mine (and I'm sure there's a difference between internal and external hard drives) , just never tried that before and i'm not sure what I all need to do to make that work .

 

I clone mine weekly to a second HDD with Acronis software. Sometimes bogus anti virus scan software gets attached to sites and really screws things up. Had this happen a couple times. My second HDD is installed in the computer in a slide out shuttle bay through a SATA connection. Has a key switch on front, so it's not always on in the system. A seperate 3rd cloned HDD too, just in case. If you're computer has a remote SATA, the way you're wanting to go for an external HDD, as way faster than USB. Cloning software's well worth the money, as just swap out HDD's, and like nothing ever happened, minus a weeks worth of work. Then clone to the infected one, and done.