best external hard drives for mac time machine

The former stores data on a spinning disc inside the drive's housing. The two options are a hard disc drive (HDD), and a solid state drive (SSD). These are both described as 'external' as they plug into a computer with a cable instead of fitting inside it. Generally speaking, there are two types of backup drive to consider. Dropping its entire contents into a new folder on a backup drive, then coming back to it later, is very simple, and quicker than uploading it all to the cloud.

Say someone wants to clean up a USB stick or a camera's SD card, but doesn't have time to go through everything and pick what to save and what to delete. And of course, there is no monthly charge for creating a personal backup.īackup drives also act as useful places to dump large amounts of data if a computer is getting full. It is also much quicker to restore large files (or large quantities of files) from a hard drive attached to a computer with a cable, than to download everything from a cloud-based backup service. But what if you decide to shift from one of these services, or if a service is bought, goes out of business, or is the victim of a hack? In those situations having a personal backup is a safer bet. With series like iCloud and DropBox, there is less need than ever to worry about creating physical backups of files. Genie Timeline, CrashPlan and Veeam are popular options to consider if you are a Windows 10 user. Mac users can plug in any large external drive and use it with Apple's own Time Machine software, while Windows users can set up Windows File History, or pick from a range of third-party backup services. At their simplest, these devices are used to make a copy of everything created and saved on a computer, whether it be written documents, presentations, images, videos, or anything else. And while photos and messages from our smartphones are regularly backed up to the cloud, making a physical backup is still highly recommended, especially for professionals working with digital files.īefore thinking all backup drives are broadly the same, note that there is a wide range of options to consider, each with different features, designs and prices. As anyone who has lost important files to a corrupted hard drive will attest, creating backups is a crucial part of modern computing.

Best external hard drives for mac time machine