To talk about the importance of a backup plan lets first ask this question; If your computer failed to turn on, or was damaged/lost, where would you be. Not being able to get back the files stored in the device. If this question makes your stomach drop or creates anxiety, you quickly need a backup device.
When you think about how computers actually keep data stored, and in tact, its close to black magic. Breakdowns, and accidents do happen. Moreover, its not just failures, loss and damage as a need to keep backups. In todays cyber warfare climate we have ransomware to deal with. If your data is corrupted and held hostage by ransomware, you can restore backups.
Select the Right Backup Device
To select the appropriate backup device, you need to first find out how big you current hard drive is. Take that size and double it at minimum. So this means, if you have a 256GB hard drive on your computer, you should get a ~500GB backup drive. The next questions is do you care about speed. A slow drive will take much longer for backups to complete whereas a faster drive will take moments to backup (after initial backup).
Agile Computer is happy to assist with a backup solution and show you how to do this.