What I learned is that external storage is important because it gives you another place to keep your website files in case something goes wrong. For this lesson, I connected Dropbox with UpdraftPlus so my WordPress backups aren’t only stored on my website. It took me a little bit to get everything connected, but now I understand why a backup somewhere else can save you a lot of trouble later.
I also learned that there are other places you can use for external storage like Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive. Dropbox is the one I used for this lesson and I liked that I could connect it to UpdraftPlus and have my backups stored somewhere else. A good thing about Dropbox is that I can get to my files from different devices, but the free version only gives you so much storage. Google Drive is another one that I am already pretty familiar with and it is easy to use, but the storage can fill up because it is also being used for other things on your Google account. OneDrive is another option and works really well if you already use Microsoft, but some of the extra storage and features can cost money. I think having any type of external storage is helpful because if something ever happens to my website, I know I still have another place where my files and backups are saved.