storage

Try Amazon Photos for Additional Cloud Backup of Your Pics

You should always back up your photos to the cloud, and many people use Google Photos. However, it is highly recommended to be prepared with a 2nd or 3rd backup in case something happens to your Google account. If you have Amazon Prime, use their unlimited uploading feature to back up your phone's pictures using Amazon's Photos app. As a Prime user, you also get to store full resolution versions of your photos, unlike Google (though limited to 5 gigabytes of video storage).

Try Google One for More Cloud Storage

If you need more storage for your Google account, such as archiving your emails, try "Google One" for peace of mind. It's a subscription plan with more benefits than Google Drive. The storage includes Drive, Gmail, and uncompressed images in Photos. Plus, it backs up important data from your Android Phone. You can share the plan with up to five family members, while also being able to hide personal files from them.

Does Asus make a good laptop?

ASUS Laptop

Episode 1676

Steve from Granada Hills, CA

Steve bought an Asus 536 2 in 1 notebook, which comes with a 256 GB storage, and a 2TB data drive. Good buy? Leo says they're great. What's the battery life about? Leo says that the battery life may be short, read the reviews. Leo recommends keeping all your data on the 2TB drive, and the programs on the 256GB drive. You can specify that in WIndows settings.

Don't Rely on Time Machine for Your Only Backup

Apple's Time Machine works in a funky way, so go over to your local store and get a large 4TB (or bigger) drive. Also, get Shirt Pocket's SuperDuper program, which will make a bootable external disk that replicates the internal drive in your system. In case something goes wrong with your internal drive, reboot your Mac while holding down the "option" key, and boot the backup. The newest version 3.2.5 supports Mojave and includes their Smart Delete, Smart Wake, and Smart Update features.

Multiple Smaller Drives are More Reliable than 1 Massive Hard Drive

Leo advises to buy multiple smaller hard drives over one extremely large hard drive. The bigger the size, the higher the error rate...which can be catastrophic in the worst case scenario. In any case, move away from old spinning drives to faster Solid-state Drives (SSD), where the cost per gigabyte is getting conveniently cheaper. You may have so much storage in the future that you could forget to discipline yourself on cleaning out files!

What's better for a budget laptop, storage or speed?

15t Value

Episode 1586

Richard from North Hills CA

Richard is in the market for a low priced laptop for $300-500. Leo says that SSDs are much faster and more reliable, but they are more expensive. Laptops with spinning drives are going to be cheaper and have more space than an SSD drive laptop. But sometimes they don't use an SSD, they use EMMC memory - the same memory on phones, so avoid that. It really comes down to how much data you want to store on it and what your needs are. Leo likes Thinkpads by Lenovo though as they're more though. For budget laptops, HP and Asus are good options as well to look into.

Free Up Space on an Android Device

There are many inexpensive, or even free, Android phones being offered by carriers that may seem too good to turn down. Unfortunately, they may be too good to be true, though. Some of these phones are crippled with very limited internal storage space, and they may not even have an SD card slot for expansion. It's also important to remember that the actual usable space on the device will be less than what is advertised, because the operating system itself takes up space.