Do Yourself a Favor and Backup Your Data - Well What Are You Waiting For?

There is nothing worse than a customer coming into the computer shop with a bad hard drive. The first thing I ask them is do you have backups of all your important and quite frankly priceless data. The most common answer I get is that all the data is on the hard drive. That was good yesterday but what about now that your hard drive may or may not be recoverable.
Close your eyes and think about what would happen if your hard drive crashed right now and you could never get your pictures, documents, and financial data back just to name a few. Scare you? Stop right there and create a backup plan immediately. Just think about how much those photos alone are worth to you. Here are a few tips on good back-up practices.
Do the backup as soon as possible. Don't wait your drive could crash anytime. You do not need to back up applications or the operating system they can be reinstalled. Back up what you cannot replace. I do not, as a rule like to use backup software because they tend to put all of your data into one big ball that can only be seen by the software itself. I feel it is better to copy files individually onto an external hard drive or in the case of a smaller amount of data writeable DVDs or CDs. Simply dragging and dropping the folders onto the new media works great. Keeping the files individual and not in a big ball will safeguard you from a possible bad write of the data in the first place. And you will be able to see what in fact you did backup and what you did not backup.
Now you have a copy locally, you can rest easy, unless something happens to the computer's hard drive and the external drive. This may Sound like it does not happen but I assure you that it does, and I seen it happen.
The final piece of the elusive backup puzzle is off-site backup. There are many services all over the internet that keep a backup of your valuable data. Carbonite is a good service that I have used and is very easy to use. However the initial backup may take some time because your upload speed is generally slower than you download speed. A good free solution is Microsoft's Skydrive if you have less than 25 GB of data. It is a much slower process but it the cost is right. You just need to set up a Microsoft Live account and you are on your way. There are many other services that all have different features that fit different people's needs but you can decide which is best for you. The most important part is to get your important data backed up in more than one place. Then if you should happen to have a hard ware failure you have piece of mind knowing that your data is at the very least safe.