backup drive Archives - Rick's Daily Tips

Q&A: Is it safe to use a USB flash drive as a backup drive?

Posted on March 9, 2025

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Question from Alan: Hi, Rick. I have a question for you.

I have a desktop PC that I use only for writing blog posts in Microsoft Word before uploading them to my WordPress blogs..

I plan to turn my blog posts into a series of books some day so I want to keep the posts stored on my hard drive in MS Word format.

Right now the 7 folders containing the posts and their associated images add up to a grand total of a little over 22 Gigabytes.

My question is do you see anything wrong with using a 64 GB USB thumb drive to hold backup copies of these 7 folders? [Read more…]

Why you shouldn’t leave your backup drive plugged into your computer

Posted on July 12, 2024

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Regular readers of this blog know I’m always mentioning how important it is to create regular backups of your Windows PC or Mac.

After all, always having a recent backup of your machine’s hard drive or SSD on hand is the very best “insurance” you can have against a catastrophic drive failure or a crippling virus infection.

But there’s one important point that I probably don’t stress nearly as much as I should…

[Read more…]

Review: WD My Book 6TB USB 3.0 Hard Drive with Backup

Posted on February 20, 2021

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Western Digital has been making some of the world’s best hard drives for decades, and their current My Book line of external USB hard drives are simply outstanding.

External hard drives are perfect for backing up large amounts of data, and the WD My Book 6TB USB 3.0 Hard Drive with Backup will store a ton of it.

6TB of storage is more than enough space to hold all of the average user’s data with plenty of room to spare.

Photos, music, video…you can keep it all safe and secure with this excellent drive and its included backup software. [Read more…]