Remember the day you heard a clicking sound coming from your computer and all your information turned to random 1’s and 0’s.  Those cherished photographs of family members, those important tax and sales records, all your favorite links to blogs like this one… lost…all lost!

Back up your hard drive! Yes, i’m sure you’ve heard it before but have you done it lately or at all?   If you’ve ever lost everything when your drive died, you swear to yourself it will never happen again.  But here you are months, years later and the harshness of that little reality has worn off.  I say, just do it and save yourself a lot of heartache.

To do it right you’ll want to have a redundant system in place.  That means at least two maybe three types of data backups.

• Purchase a backup hard drive for home and office.  You can now get an external 2TB for around $100 (1,024 GB = 1 TB). Businesses may want to consider server backup systems.

• Offsite hard drive backups or “cloud”.  These are server farms that house your data somewhere else. Carbonite (www.carbonite.com) and Mozy (www.mozy.com) are two examples of cloud based backup systems.

• Hard copies. You don’t have to use paper, you can burn your data to DVD.

Think of backing up your hard drive as the equivalent of a good “flossing” regiment for your technical hygiene program.  Nobody really likes to do it but you’ll be glad you did!

Check out this link for more good information:  “Storing Your Files Inside The Cloud”

Stay safe!