How To Use An External Hard Drive

Once you have added more storage space to your computer, you will want to know how to use an external hard drive to store new programs or to backup important files or data. External hard drives offer users many options for backing up, storing, and sharing data. It's easy to plug an external hard drive into a different computer to share files or to retrieve files lost when a primary hard drive has failed.

If you are using a computer with Windows, it will be easy to locate your external hard drive when accessing the "my computer" feature from your start menu. When you open "my computer," your external hard drive will show up along with the other hard drive(s) on your computer. Much of the time an external hard drive will have the letter E or F assigned to it. Your primary hard drive will be C:\ and if your computer came with more than one hard drive installed, the other drive is likely to be D:\.

In order to store or retrieve data on an external hard drive, you will need:

• An external hard drive installed and formatted on your computer

Once you have installed and formatted the external hard drive on your computer, you are ready to store and retrieve files as you wish.

1. After your external hard drive is installed and formatted, you will access it like any other hard drive on your computer. You will be able to select your new external hard drive as a place to store new files and programs when you download them and you can backup or copy existing files or programs to your new external hard drive as well.
2. It's important to backup files and programs that are important to you because if you have never experienced a hard drive failure, it's likely to occur at some point and you don't want to lose irreplaceable photos or files when it happens. Aside from being a great backup solution for your computer, an external hard drive is an excellent place to store new programs and files when your primary hard drive has reached its capacity.
3. External hard drives are a great place to store music, video, and photo files that take up large amounts of storage space. It's also easy to unplug an external hard drive and plug it into a new computer to access files. It's easy to find external hard drives for under a hundred dollars these days, so there's no excuse not to backup your important data!