Your Computer Files Worth $100 to You?

Save your files, photos, movies, movie clips, documents, programs, software onto a USB drive. Don't use DVDs and CDs for backup, get an external USB drive.
Example, I bought a Maxtor 160gig drive for $80. My hard drive on my desktop and laptop are both 80gigs. Total files backed up from both computers is less than 80 gigs.
Pros:
* Easy: plug the USB drive into the computer, it becomes another drive on your computer, drag and drop directories onto your USB drive.
* Faster to copy files and directories onto the USB drive than to backup to a DVD or CD.
* Compact, my USB drive and cable is a smaller then my 12 DVD carry case and yet 160gigs is larger storage than 35 DVDs, or 200 CDs.
* Easy/fast/convent read and write.
* Can copy multiple gigs from one computer to another fast and easy.
Cons:
* An initial out lay of $80-$130 for the drive. But is not your photos, documents and other much worth much more?

Suggestions:
* From time to time, backup the USB drive files onto an offsite computer. This secures your data in case of a total loss, example house theft or fire.
* For photos, I upload my recent best to Google photos, example, picasaweb tigerfarm. So I have my photos on my computer and on the Google computers.
* For convenience, buy the USB drive that does not require an external power supply.
* Use the sync software that comes with the hard drive, or use some kind of backup strategy such as the one following.
Backup Strategy:
* Move your static files, files that do not change, to a common directory.
Example, I have graphics directory for my photos, movies, clips, and music.
I created a directory called graphicsStatic. Under graphics static, I have sub directories based on date of backup. Now, my graphics directory is just for new files.
* I backup both my graphics and graphicsStatic directories. Backup graphicsStatic once. The graphics directory backup when feel the need.


Note, there are 2 basic types of USB drives:
1. No external power supply, the power for the drive is from the USB port. These drives are small is physical size and smaller in disk size for the money.
Example: when on sale in the San Francisco Bay area, $80 for 160 gigs, $100 for 250gigs.
2. External power supply which requires the drive to be plugged into the wall power, and plugged in to the computer USB for data transfer. These drives are larger, 500gig and 1 terabyte are common.
Disadvantage is time and inconvenience to plug into the wall power when you want to use it.