There is a saying among computer people (i.e.. geeks) – if it’s not backed up twice it’s not backed up.

I am a huge proponent of doing regular backup’s of data. Most people don’t back up until they’ve suffered the pain of losing data and I’m one of those people. About 10 years ago I lost an entire hard drive and it cost over $800 to retrieve all the data. Ten years later and those prices are about the same – it’s not easy to retrieve data from a bad hard drive. Ever since then I’ve done regular automated backups to an external hard drive using 3rd party back up software (currently I’m using Genie-Soft, but if you have Windows 7 the built-in back-up software is actually good – it was pretty useless in XP and Vista). If you don’t have a lot of data you can save some money and use a USB flash drive to back up your essential pictures, documents, etc.

But what happens if a real disaster happens? Your house catches fire, your computer (and backup drive) are stolen, a tornado rolls through the area. It was this last one that really got me thinking since the Midland tornado was only a few kilometers from where I live. The solution is to back up off-site – somewhere on the Internet. My first thought was that the one thing I could never recreate were all my digital pictures. For this I started to use Google’s Picasa. The basic Picasa account comes with 2GB of free storage space, but I quickly surpassed that and purchased 20GB of space from Google for an amazingly low $5 a year. I like Picasa because I can back up all my pictures and mark them Private (so only I can see them, but they are still backed up) plus I can mark others as public so then I can show all my family and friends pictures online instead of emailing everyone pictures. You can see my public gallery at http://picasaweb.google.com/dennisjmadison

Now what about a complete online backup that is really automated? For this I use Carbonite. From their website:
”Carbonite installs a small application on your computer that works quietly in the background looking for new and changed files that need to be backed up. It looks and feels just like part of your computer, and is integrated with your operating system - there's no new interface for you to learn.”

It is priced from $54.95 a year to $129 for three years (the package I went with). It works extremely well and doesn’t slow up your computer. As a bonus you can access your files from anywhere in the world. Just log into your account online and you can access all your files. Just make sure you use a strong password and that you never lose it. Carbonite encrypts all your data twice – once on your computer and again on their servers. Even they won’t be able to access your files so make sure you know your password.

Even if you don’t back up your data twice, please back it up in at least once spot and be sure to do it on a regular basis – daily, weekly, monthly. An old backup is better than no backup. Two backups are even better.