I would imagine that this is one of the house keeping duties which most people with computers are the most lax with, that is, to back up your data. As with a lot of these sorts of actions, it seems that most people need to get burned (at least once) before they start to adhere to a backup strategy. In the last few years the level is basic convenience in dealing with this job has gotten to the point where there is no reasonable excuse to not take care of this business.
The whole topic of backing up your computer can run the gamut from backing up your whole system (including your Operating System), any variety of incremental backups (i.e. to make one primary backup, and then merely append the changed files on a regular basis), and using a wider variety of storage media.
Nowadays, the price for a external (usually a USB drive) has gotten so low that there everyone with a computer should have one. Many of these USB hard drives (from Seagate, Maxtor, etc.) come with backup software on the drive (for free). Once again, this is a tool worth checking out (it may be the final word in backups for you at this point…).
There is some really great software out these days for PCs to make any form of these backups (from whole system to incremental backups). Any Google search should bring you to products like the Acronis, if you are a Windows user their True Image software really is good (I’ve been using for several years).
Besides using USB external hard drives, some of you may already have an NAS (network attached storage), this is basically a simple server PC (running Windows, Linux, or what have you) which is merely a hard drive on a PC on your network (i.e. always on, and easily accessible). If you already have one of these…the odds are that you already have a backup strategy… I should mention that Acronis True Image works on both external drives and a NAS system…
Besides dealing with storage on your home network, there are growing numbers of people who are using online backup services (read: Mozy, or Carbonite…as examples).The net result is that instead of paying (up front) for some local storage media (the aforementioned USB HD’s or a NAS set up) , you could just rent some space on the internet and run a simple application which will handle all of your chores for you. This is what Mozy and Carbonite give you. The advantages are that if your house were to burn down (as an example…) you could still have access to all of your files. Both of these services have plans that run to less than $5.00 a month (in the case of Carbonite, of you pay for two or three years in advance, it is less than $4.00 a month…).
Beyond these points, I have a few more links showing much of what I’ve just told you (mostly about how important it is to back up your stuff!).
PC Mag
Make Use OF
The Best free Backup Software for your PC
At this point you might be asking what I do for a backup strategy… I guess you could call my strategy a complex one in that I save some kinds of data on (several, remember redundancy is valuable in this situation) a couple USB drives, other things are stored in the cloud, and I also perform yearly complete system backups, with incremental backups every now and then (somewhere between every week, and every month).
For some of my cloud storage methods, I use DropBox, EverNote and even some Google storage space. The reason that I don’t get into using one of the online services is that with a NetBook, I don’t keep very much information residing on my computer. If you have a need to back up lots (and I mean lots) of music (MP3’s), movies (big, big files), and photos…the online storage services may be the way to go.
Finally, my backup strategy is especially important in that backing up my NetBook, implicitly backs up my iPad, and iPhone backups (via iTunes syncing…). If you have never had any ‘real’ computer problems, data loss, a hard drive crash, or have a laptop turn into a brick, I would suggest turning off your computer for a few days, and if you start to go crazy (actually this is another big problem!), I would suggest that this is why you need to back everything up!
