There Are Easy Solutions If You Need Additional Hard Drive Space

The other day, I happened to check how much space was left on my home computer's hard drive.

Yikes. Less than 1 percent. Two thoughts raced to mind.

1) The rate of catastrophic failure for hard drives skyrockets after three years, and mine was older. (When they die, they're dead.)

2) That hard drive holds every family photo and video I'd ever taken, plus all my music and documents.

Words cannot describe the wrath that would befall me should those photos and videos disappear.

Lucky for me, this year has brought a wave of easy and inexpensive options for people who accidentally stuff their hard drives to capacity. And the systems for doing so have suddenly become supersimple.

External Hard Drives

Perhaps the fastest, easiest and cheapest method to gain some extra digital real estate is buying an external hard drive. If there's a floor to prices for such drives, there's no sign manufacturers have reached it yet.

I bought a Western Digital drive with a terabyte of space from Target for just $149. Amazon sells a drive half that big for $70. That's astonishingly cheap, but even six months ago similar drives cost $50 more.

To give you a sense of scale, 1 terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes - enough space to hold 250,000 photos or 440 hours of DVD quality video.

When I copied all my files, photos, videos and MP3s to that drive, it took less than 20 minutes and occupied just 2 percent of my new drive's capacity. Acres remain to hold drafts of my upcoming thriller about dueling undead zombie secret agents.

For notebook computer fans, portable drives have similar retail prices. But expect to pay another 20 percent or so for drives powered solely by the USB connection.

As for software to automate the backup process, some drives include the programs. Memeo.com also sells a backup program for $30 that automatically mirrors all your files in the background and instantly copies any files that you've changed.

For those looking for privacy, lesser-known drivemaker CMS sells a 320 gigabyte encrypted drive for $207 that also mirrors system software so you can boot up a computer with a completely fried internal drive.

Apple puts the "ridiculously" in front of "easy" when it comes to backing up data. Apple's Time Machine drive can silently, even wirelessly, mirror everything on your computer's drive. And pulling back a file from the past is simple as choosing which one you'd like to bring back to life.

Web Storage

Another option is online backup services. The advantage with these are your files are automatically copied elsewhere by companies that make their own backups. So if your computer gets hit by an asteroid or drenched by a storm, your files are still safe for downloading later.

Two of the more popular services are Carbonite.com, which costs $55 a year, and Mozy.com, which offers 2 gigabytes free and an "Unlimited" version for less than $5 a month or $55 a year.

The disadvantage to such services comes with the file transfer, which relies on your own broadband connection, and uploading files to the Internet can take a very long time, days or weeks even.

Since we live in Florida, I'll insert the obligatory reference to hurricane season, which begins in a few short months and brings lots of rain, wind and power surges that tend to fry computers. (If you evacuate, just grab your handy external drive and you're good to go.)

Whether you chose external drive or Internet backup service, there are no more good excuses for not backing up your stuff.