The Product: External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

With the amount of digital data that we store on our computers today including all of our pictures and music, having an effective back-up solution is a must. An External Hard Drive will give you the capacity to back-up your entire computer in a matter of minutes, keeping the files in a normally accessibly format. Simply plug one of these devices into your USB port and it will show up as a drive, allowing you to copy or access any of your files. Don’t wait until you actually lose data to develop a back-up plan. These devices make it easy.

Recommendation: Western Digital 160 GB USB 2.0 Passport External Hard Drive

Western Digital is one of the largest makers of computer hard drives and the Wester Digital Passport 160GB is a very compact and sturdy product. Given that hard drive capacity costs less and less each year, I wouldn't bother buying a drive that holds more than 2-3X the capacity of your computer. For most people 160GB is more than enough. I am recommending the Passport because it is well priced, very portable and does not need an external power source like some of the lower end drives. The Passport gets its power from your computer or laptop’s USB drive, making it that much more plug and play. You can also download software that will automatically send copies of any new or changed files to the portable drive. For those that always procrastinate backing up their data, this is a great option.

Devil's Advocate:

Make sure that your computer has USB 2.0 before purchasing one of these drives. Although USB 1.0 and 2.0 ports look exactly the same, the latter is 40x faster. Transferring your data will take a long time if your computer cannot take advantage of the faster speed. Most computers in the past four years have 2.0.