Everyone knows how important it is to backup their data. Whether it’s photos, movies, Emails or documents our data is important to us. Keeping that data safe is not always an easy thing to do. It’s easy to forget about backing up, or even worse, backing up to a single location and losing that backup due to a failed drive or other disaster. The key to keeping data safe its to have a three-pronged attack.
- Backup to DVD or external drive regularly.
- Automatically backup to a Network Attached Storage device.
- Automatically backup to a web-based service.
The second two choices are set-it and forget-it options which are necessary. The first option is something you consciously do to make sure you’re getting all of the data you need. Backup to DVD, a thumbdrive or external USB hard drive weekly or monthly. It’s good to have a DVD in a jewel case at your fingertips for fast-recovery of data. The Network Attached Storage device for option 2 we recommend is the Western Digital My Book World Edition 1 TB Network Attached Storage . This drive sits on your network anywhere in the house and monitors your computer for changes and automatically backs them up. The final option is a web-based option like Carbonite. Carbonite also sits in the background and monitors the folders you specify for changes. It backs all this information up to their servers where you can recover it if you ever need to. The benefit to this is it is an off-site backup. The annual cost for Carbonite is around $50 USD. The 1 TB drive is less than $200 USD to purchase. A small price to pay for keeping those precious files safe.
