Back Up Your Freakin Data

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Added by	Thomas Robertson
Short description	Back up your freakin data
main document (e.g. datasheet)
Additional Keywords	data, backup

Considering how much of your life currently resides on your computer, you should back that data up. Quick thought experiment: imagine your computer catching on fire and being destroyed beyond recovery. What part is more terrifying: shelling out the cash for a new one, or knowing that all the stuff you had saved on it is gone forever.

That's what I thought.

If you do nothing else, go out today and buy the biggest external hard drive you can afford. Then bring it home and copy your files onto it. It's not a very good solution, but it's worlds better than nothing, and for not that much money you'll save yourself an infinite amount of heartache if the worst does happen.

You'd be much better off using some real backup software. Time Machine should be avoided, but it's certainly better than nothing. On Windows you can grab a copy of the feature-free and actually-free Toucan.

But even an external drive like that can crash, and Murphy tells us that it will almost always do so only immediately after the original files have disappeared. It's also easy to let your backups get out of date. So your best solution is to use an online service. My current favorite is Back Blaze. For $5 a month you can back up an unlimited amount of data on your computer. And considering how much data we tend to generate here, that's a bargain.

So what are you waiting to? Get to it!