Western Digital My Passport 1 TB

I'm a computer repair technician, and one issue I have all the time with my customers is, the famous, 'a virus hijacked my computer and those precious pictures are inside'. Yeah, the prom, the honeymoon, or the newborn pictures are usually held without ransom. Most of the time we are dealing with malware of some sort that affects the Windows operating system files, but leaves the data intact. So, before I repair the computer, I rescue the pictures, and any other file they might value. However, not all repair technicians do this, most allege that the files are corrupted, which might be the case, but usually it really means they are too busy to rescue anything, don't know how to do it, or will not do it unless paid big cash.

For one own's sakes, the best thing to do is backing up the data before the computer gets infected, or the hard drive fails. For pictures I recommend backing up the original files into data discs, but for faster everyday files backups (music, movies, games, software etc.) is better to use an external hard drive.
This drive is great not only to keep multimedia files, but also for storing documents in digital form, because it saves space. Besides, in case of an emergency it's faster to grab it then a folder. I've been doing backups using both hard drives and discs, and it has been of great help throughout the years. For example, the last time I moved, the new school district wanted my daughter first vaccines' records. I knew I have the original card somewhere in a box, but I needed it fast. Then I remembered I scanned the card years ago, and that print-scanned image, which was storage in my daughter's digital folder, inside my external hard drive, saved me hours of search and quickened her registering process at the new school.

About the WD SmartWare software offered by the manufacturer, I hesitated before going for it, because in the past WD back up software didn't work well for me. However, when one is dealing with such a big amount of data, doing it manually is a pain, and the alternative of using the backup and restore features included in Microsoft Windows 7, is something I would only do for a complete system image, not for the everyday backup. So, I installed the WD SmartWare software and so far, it's performing well, it does require time and attention to learn its functionality though. If you decide not to use the WD SmartWare, you can still use the hard drive right out of the box, like any other external hard drive.

Besides reading the user's manual, I strongly suggest that before plugging in the drive into your computer, you go to the Western Digital My Passport's support page, and read how to use it.

Because there are a few details to know before starting backing up your data. Among these topics, How to install WD SmartWare from the external drives, How to create a category backup using WD SmartWare, How to backup specific files and folders using WD SmartWare, How to retrieve a backup using WD SmartWare, Setting up security to lock or unlock a WD external drive with WD SmartWare, (videos are provided in some of these), and How to partition and format a WD drive on Windows (7, Vista, XP) and Mac OSX etc., etc.

The Western Digital My Passport 2 TB is an awesome way to carry large amounts of data in a tiny container, that is always available and secure. I love its dimensions, both physically and in bytes.