How would you react if you came home to find that everything in your house was gone? Every photo album, every piece of furniture, every document, every DVD or CD, every utensil, all your clothes, every last book. Everything.
If you don’t have a backup system for your computer, that’s what you are waiting to happen to all your data.
Unlike losing everything in your house (which would take some pretty dedicated thieves) losing everything on your computer is a question of ‘when’ not ‘if’.
Computer hard drives, (where information is stored) are fragile things. Heat, humidity, age, electrical shock and magnets are just a few of the things that can destroy a drive and cause you to lose everything on it.
Google did a study of 100,000 hard drives and found that the chance that a hard drive will fail in a given year is between 4% and 10%.
If there was a 10% chance every year that you’d lose all your household items, you’d do something about it.
The work that has gone into collecting, editing and categorizing all your digital data is enormous. Even if you spent just two hours a day on average working on your computer over the last five years, that’s 3,500 hours of effort – the equivalent of two years of 40-hour work weeks.
Fortunately, there is an easy way to back up your computer files. Mozy.com offers a free service that will back up two gigabytes of your stuff. Every night, Mozy will upload the files you’ve worked on to a secure server in Utah. If your computer drive crashes, Mozy will mail you back your data on a DVD or you can re-download it.
If you have more than 2 gigabytes of stuff Mozy will let you store unlimited amounts of stuff for just five bucks a month.
Head over to Mozy, right now, and sign up for an account – then when your hard drive crashes you can be secure in the knowledge that you haven’t lost a lifetime of work.
Click here to sign up for a Mozy account.
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Header photograph by mandyxclear
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offsite-storing your most important data is important. but don’t forget to do backups on an external hard drive, as it lets you backup your music, films, programs and user-data, too. it will cost you about 100$, but you’ll appreciate it, when your hard drive fails…
great tips though and i’m looking forward to the rest of the month… =)
cheers,
aprica
Thanks for the comment and it’s very true. I have a cheap drive that I use with Time Machine and I rely on it all the time. I didn’t write about that though because I have yet to find a decent Windows equivalent to Time Machine. Do you know of one?
Don’t misunderstand, I know there are a lot of amazing backup programs for Windows, I just haven’t found anything that’s both as simple and easy-to-use as Time Machine. I’m looking for a Windows backup program that Grandma could use.
Windows Home Server does amazing things with backups. If that doesn’t fit your setup there are wifi routers with usb ports for external drives. Tons of freeware backup programs for windows. Including drive imaging (xml).
@Productive Porcupine
Try Windows Backup; it’s included with Windows Vista and Windows 7. It works just like Time Machine, except that it can only do daily, weekly, or monthly backups, but not hourly ones as far as I’m aware. Honestly though, a daily backup should be good enough for Grandma. :)
really excellent advice. wish more of my friends read this.
also, crashplan (http://www.crashplan.com) is free software and lets you back up to both another hard drive, or a friend’s computer, or to their for-pay remote off-site service. i use to to back up *both* to my external hard drive *and* my office at work — all for free. it also works on linux as well as mac/win.
also, spideroak (http://www.spideroak.com) is great and has an additional “sync” feature for those people who want to synchronize their data on some folders shared between two separate computers. also mac/win/linux. they give you 2g free storage too.
the user interface on both of these could be better, but they are GUI’s and they do both work pretty easily. both also do versioning, as well, so that you can choose from which version of a file you want to restore. also, both use encryption when storing the files.
crashplan really helped me to get a backup going on an external hard drive at home, and spideroak helped me to sync one folder i want to have at work, too. crashplan also sends a weekly email to you, as well, summarizing the state of your backups. nice!