World Backup Day
This has geek humor all over it. It is apparently World Backup Day (April Fool’s Eve), we really are dorks…
Anyway, it is an important point. Backing up you computer is one of those things everyone knows they should do, and say they do, until it crashes and they sheepishly admit they may have missed one or two years. <sigh>
The look in someone’s eyes when they hand you a dead computer hoping you can recover their music, work or memories; it is just plain sad.
As a disclaimer, I will say I have never used this service, but one of the security podcasts I listen to is sponsored by them and from what I have read it seems to be a pretty inexpensive, easy to use solution – Carbonite www.carbonite.com .
Your data is encrypted, which is a good start. You may have seen their TV commercials and at $55 /year it is much cheaper than data recovery services – trust me. Apparently you can also access your files via a Smartphone from their service, which is kind of cool.
If you are a bit more on the paranoid side, there are also many home network aware storage (NAS) devices out there. I prefer the Linksys models just because, regardless of how irritating Cisco can be at times, I believe they have reliable gear. Of course all the hard drive vendors, Seagate, Barracuda etc have their own versions and they do know hard drives, so most likely good options as well.
I will throw in here, for really priceless items, I would also burn them off on a DVD or save to another USB drive, maybe even just saving to your Gmail as an attachment to an unsent email (Draft) – anything to have at least one other copy of it. Even backup devices can fail.
Last but not least, if even after World Backup Day, you make a conscious choice to avoid backing up your computer, there is a $90 program out there called Spin-Rite www.grc.com that you can run on your computer to keep your hard drive in shape. It has also been known to recover a hard drive which has stopped booting. I have saved stuff with Spin-Rite and love it.
BUT, backing up is really the answer.
Trust me; this is what you will look like to the Geek Squad when you need your data recovered.
Sad, isn’t it…