I have lost count of the number of times I’ve been tortured by the prospect of losing my Outlook .pst or key business files.
I was aware of backing up files for a long time, but blew it off until a little while back when the latest in a series of friends experienced a fried hard drive.
So, I’m asking you today to start back everything up. If you’re already doing it, do it more often and in more places. It’s amazing how it has calmed me – I literally used to lose sleep thinking about my important files being vaporized.
As far as I am concerned, you can’t have too many redundancies when it comes to your backups.
If you are currently running your email locally, I’d suggest bringing it into Gmail, too. Just go to Settings > Accounts > Get mail from other accounts.
You can add in any POP account there.
And then the rest of your stuff – put it up at online storage services, as well as external hard drives and DVDs.
I use JungleDisk for online backups, and have them scheduled in the middle of the night, seven days a week. JungleDisk stores the data on Amazon.com’s S3 Storage Service, so even if JungleDisk were to disappear, your files are at Amazon.com.
As far as my local backups, my main one is an Iomega Desktop Hard Drive with a capacity of 1 TB.
I also backup regularly to a Seagate FreeAgent Go external hard drive with 160 GB, which is small and light. I travel with it, so I have all of my important files at the ready.
And I’ve got a couple other external hard drives that act as the backups to my backups.
Plus, I backup static files, like photos, videos and podcasts, to DVDs.
I try to keep my hardware safe, too, with a combination surge protector and battery backup.
Not only does it provide some protection for my computers, printer, scanner, etc., but also it enables me to save anything that I am working on if the power is knocked out.
Currently, I use the APC 1500VA Battery Backup with LCD.
A little paranoid? Yes, but I’m covered. Don’t put it off – cover your assets.