At Rent-A-Geek headquarters in downtown Mankato, there are so many broken hard drives lying around that owner Pete Meixl has hung them in the office like garland.

Those dozens of broken hard drives represent gigabyte upon gigabyte of lost data: digital photos, music files, Word documents, personal accounting information and more.

“Hard drives break,” Meixl said. “They’re like a light bulb: They either work or they don’t work.”

Data recovery is expensive, time consuming and not always successful. A much better — and often cheaper — solution, Meixl said, is to invest in a computer backup system.

External hard drives and a growing number of online backup services are making it easier for computer owners to save and protect their data. When files are lost because of a hardware malfunction or human error, they can be restored from the back up copies.

External hard drives

The preferred backup solution for Peter Johnson, a computer careers instructor at South Central College, is to use an external hard drive. Whenever Johnson needs to copy files, he just connects the hard drive via the USB port and, with a couple of mouse clicks, his files are copied and stored.

An external hard drive is a step above other data storage solutions, like a flash drive or CD-ROM. It makes retrieving data faster and easier.

Small-capacity external hard drives — capable of storing 60 or 80 gigabytes — often start under $100. The price of the hard drives generally increases with the storage capacity.

A software program is required to manage the file transfer to an external hard drive. Some, such as SyncToy for Windows, are offered for free.

Johnson said he spent closer to $300 for a larger-capacity hard drive, but it has proven its value. He recalled a recent incident when he accidentally wrote over a file he had spent the entire day creating.

“I said to myself, ‘Oh, how did I do that?’” he said. “I had completely obliterated all my copies.”

Luckily, another copy was sitting safe and sound on his external hard drive.

One important tip for the use of an external hard drive: Don’t move it while it’s backing up files. The hard drives are extremely sensitive and can be broken if jostled, Johnson said.

Online options