Two ways to backup your MacBook Air!

by Ashoke Ghosh, Assistant Principal

The most important practice you can develop when using a laptop is backing up your data. Computers are only useful tools if you can continue to access documents, images, and applications on your computer's hard drive. Please remember that hard drives can fail or become corrupted and if this happens you can lose all of your important files. This usually becomes a problem when its the night before a paper is due or you go to print some photos for a holiday card and all of a sudden your files are gone.

How can I backup my MacBook Air?

There are two ways to backup your laptop, the first method requires that you purchase an external hard drive or flash drive and the second method utilizes a cloud storage solution. This solution utilizes the internet to upload files to a remote storage facility.  Lets break down the two methods and then you can decide which method works best for you.

External Hard Drive Method:
These drives come in various sizes and ideally it should be as large or larger than your existing hard drive in your MacBook Air. Therefore, the drive should be at least 128gb in size. However, I would recommend buying a 500gb drive or larger unless you are only going to save small files. Just keep in mind students have a lot of music, photos, videos, and games and these files and programs require much more space.
There are a variety of vendors that sell these drives. You can purchase them from big-box stores like Best Buy and Staples or your can get competitive prices with online retailers like Newegg and TigerDirect. Once you have decided on the size of your drive determine if you want a USB 2.0, USB 3.0, or Thunderbolt. The main difference between these choices is speed. USB 2.0 has the slowest data transfer speeds and they get faster as you move towards a Thunderbolt connection. The trade-off is cost, a USB 2.0 back-up solution is cheaper. A typical 500gb, USB 3.0 portable hard drive costs about $60.00.
If you are looking for a smaller solution you can choose to purchase a flash drive or jump drive that connects to the USB port as well. These drives are smaller and usually have smaller storage capacities. They typically range from 1gb - 128gb in size and are sold by many vendors. The benefits of having a jump drive is it size and cost. They generally are a little cheaper but get pretty expensive as you approach the 128gb size. The one thing to consider with this type of drive is that they tend to get lost because they are so small.

Cloud Storage Methods:
Cloud solutions are convenient in many ways but depending on the solution you pick, they can be more pricey over a long period of time. Many vendors charge by month or year and you can expect to pay at least $60/year. The key benefits of a cloud solution are no external drives or equipment, large storage capacities, and increased access to your files via the internet. Most solutions work by installing a piece of software on your machine which enables you to connect to the storage solution. The initial syncing of data may take 1 day to a week depending on the solution you pick because the data must travel from your computer to a remote server via your wireless network. However, once the initial backup is completed follow-up back ups take place automatically in the background and you don't have to manage it. This is one of the major problems with external drives you have to remember to plug it into your computer for it to work. If you are a little more savvy you can connect a backup drive to your home network and the machine will backup when it finds your home network. Here are some vendors to get you started:
Carbonite, Dolly Drive, Justcloud, Sugarsync and Mozy.