Having lived through an apartment building fire, I can summon with picture-perfect recall the exact feelings of dread inspired by the moment I saw my laptop and external SSD, onto which I regularly backed up my files, covered in the black soot that had been wood and wallboard hours earlier when I’d fallen asleep.It was the nudge that got me thinking not just about how often and in how many places I backed up my files, but also about what kinds of drives I was entrusting them to. It’s how I ended up with a Samsung T7 Shield among my fleet of backup drives.(opens in a new window)SamsungT7 Shield(opens in a new window)Available at AmazonBuy Now(opens in a new window)Available at WalmartBuy Now(opens in a new window)Available at B&H Photo VideoBuy Now(opens in a new window)for pricelessly irreplaceable filesIt wasn’t the hardware I was all that concerned about. Expensive, yeah, but replaceable. Somewhere on assembly lines in China and South Korea, Apple and Samsung were cranking out identical versions of the two devices.What I was worried about were the files on those devices. They were priceless to me, and if the splashing of the firefighters’ hoses or the pervasiveness of the black soot had snuck their way into their SSDs and killed them, that’d be the greater tragedy.As a digital security writer, I worry about this sort of thing a lot. It was enough for me to make at least one of my backup SSDs a ruggedized hard drive. I picked the impact-, dust-, and water-resistant version of the Samsung T-series portable SSDs that make up the bulk of my regular manual backups.The Shield comes covered in a grippy rubber coating that helps minimize the shock of dropping the drive. It’s designed to survive a three-meter (9.8-foot) drop. That’s in addition to its IP65 dust- and water-resistance rating.IP65 is suitable for protecting against errant splashes and normal amounts of dust. It can’t survive a tumble into a body of water, but how often do you have an SSD around the pool?Samsung doesn’t make a Shield version of the T9 yet. Maybe it never will. The latest Shield is the T7 Shield, developed from the last-generation T7. I still use some T7s. They’re not as fast as the T9—1,050 MB/s data transfer speed versus the T9’s 2,000 MB/s—but they’re still fast in real-world use.You should always back up to at least two more places, giving yourself a minimum of three copies of your files for redundancy. Storage space is cheap, and so is the peace of mind that comes with, at least, weekly backups.Backing up to the cloud as a secondary method is a good idea, too. And if you want a bit of added protection, make one of those SSDs a ruggedized one, just in case you end up with a fire, a fall, or a spill someday.(opens in a new window)SamsungT7 Shield(opens in a new window)Available at AmazonBuy Now(opens in a new window)Available at WalmartBuy Now(opens in a new window)Available at B&H Photo VideoBuy Now(opens in a new window)The post Samsung’s T7 Shield Portable SSD Will Protect Your Files—and Your Sanity appeared first on VICE.