There’s an old saying that my dad, who worked in software his whole life, liked to say often and emphatically. It stuck in my head as a kid in the ’90s, and it must’ve conditioned my young, impressionable brain well enough because I think about it often. I even say it to my friends, coworkers, enemies, and anyone who will listen.
“If it doesn’t exist in three places, it doesn’t exist.” He never claimed to have invented it. Instead, it was something said often around the halls of Data General, where he worked, and later EMC and Network Appliances.
Because losing a computer would suck but losing my files would be devastating, I back up everything of mine regularly on the cloud and on physical drives. Out of a smattering of hard drives, new and old, the Samsung T9 is what forms the core of my backup system.
fast, cheap, reliable
Unless you’re a professional (or extremely serious amateur) backing up raw files of photographs or tons of videos, you can make do with a 1TB drive. Document files and common, compressed-format picture files are quite small, and so you can fit an awful lot of them on a 1TB drive.
Hard drives (HDDs, for “hard disk drives”) win on storage space per dollar, and they still have a place for those professionals backing up the kinds of mega-sized files I describe above. For everybody else, solid-state drives (SSDs) are faster, smaller, and less prone to damage caused by rough handling.
There’s no separate power brick to plug into the wall of this portable external drive. Just connect it to your device via the included USB-C-to-USB-C cable, and it’ll both transfer data through that connection and run the SSD.
I’ve been using Samsung’s external SSDs to back up my files for the past seven years. From the T5 to its successor, the T7, to its successor, the T9, I’ve never lost data to corruption among the five I’ve owned. They’ve never failed to turn on or up and died.
Every week, like clockwork, I plug them in and they do their duty. There are 2TB and 4TB versions for sale, too, that cost a bit of extra coin. Regardless of their capacity, I trust them with my precious files, which unlike even the priciest smartphone or laptop, you can’t simply replace if lost.
If you’re not backing up your files regularly, you’re living an inch from disaster.
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