External hard drives are a great way to save important information. These can be used to save personal photos, documents, videos, and more! Have you ever worried about losing everything on your computer? You should.

If for some reason your computer crashes what will you have safe?

An external hard drive can be used to backup your entire computer, given that it is large enough. It's a good idea to backup anything that is important to you and that you don't want to lose.

With an external hard drive you can save your date and take it with you. You can take the date anywhere you go, and you can even share it with friends! It's easy to connect to another computer and copy your data and even add data from that computer as well!

External hard drives come in many different sizes for many different needs. You can get a simple thumb drive that may hold 2GB of data or you maybe you want 500GB or maybe more.

Different size hard drives range in price. You can pick up a small thumb drive for as little as $20.00 and prices go up into the hundreds!

It all depends on what you want to save. You won't need an external hard drive that is bigger than your internal hard drive, unless you plan to delete the data after you save it to the external hard drive and then want to add more later.

If you want to start a music collection with an external hard drive and use this as your main storage place then you may need a larger external drive.

If you just want to backup your computer, then you won't need any more space then what your internal drive holds.

The disc space is the amount of space on your hard drive. You have "total space" which is the size of the hard drive. "Space used" is the amount of the hard drive that you are currently using including programs, pictures, videos, music, and more. "Free space" is obviously how much space you have left on the drive.

To check your internal hard drive on a PC simply open "my computer" and either scroll over or click(one click) on the main drive, usually "C." You will see a display message that will say; "total size(or "capacity")," "space used," and "free space."

On a MAC hold "CTRL(Control)" and click on your drive, click "get info." The disc "capacity," "available capacity," and "used capacity" will be displayed.

Chances are that you may not be using all of your hard drive capacity.

You can pick up a cheap thumb drive at your local wal-mart. If you are looking for large hard drive I would suggest looking online, try ebay!

An external hard drive is easy to use, most use a USB cord, simply plug it into your computer and drag and drop!

When you connect the hard drive to your computer it should show up in your external devices. You can simply drag any files that you want to backup into the external hard drive. The files will write to the disc and you can disconnect. Important! Do not disconnect the hard drive while files are being copied to it!

It was that easy! Your files are safe incase your computer is lost, stolen, or crashes.