Do you store your photo albums or wedding dress in the oven??!

Then, why are you leaving all your impossible-to-recreate data solely on a hard drive that has a life expectancy of 3 – 5 years?  I’ve had two die after 6 months so they can pretty much go any time.

You get back from vacation, sunburned and tired, you finally muster up the energy to transfer your images from your digital camera, and then create a slideshow for the family with them.  You think you are done?  No way, you’ve got back those babies up or they could be wiped out any day.

By not taking steps to back up your memories (data), you are asking for major heart ache down the road.

Here are some high level strategies for making sure your data is safe:

Keep all your data in one place: either really store everything in “My Documents” or create a directory called c:\data and then create sub dirs in there like c:\data\pictures, c:\data\videos, c:\data\music, c:\data\documents, etc.  Having your data in one place makes it a million times easier to back up.

If you don’t have an external hard drive, stop reading at this point and go get one!!!  How terrible would you feel losing the only images from your wedding, that video you worked on for countless hours, or all your finicial data?  I recommend external hard drives because you can set up programs to automatically back up your data for you…it’s what I do most of the time because I am lazy and know I won’t remember to do it consistently.  They can run anywhere from $60 to $400. 

Sporadically check to make sure your backups are actually backing up ALL of your data PROPERLY.  What’s the point of backups if they don’t backup the right data or last worked 8 months ago?

Occasionaly, burn DVDs or CDs of your data.  External hard drives have the same life expectancy as normal hard drives and it is unlikely that you would lose both your computer’s hard drive and external hard drive at the same time but electrical storms or burgalurs would prove me wrong.  DVDs / CDs have a life expectancy of 2 to 3 times that of hard drives.

Keep a copy of your data offsite.  No matter how diligent you are in your backups, fires and thieves won’t respect it so you need to make sure your data is somewhere really, really safe.  Personally, I have collections of data on my computer that represent multiple years of work.  I’d rather lick a razor blade (as my baby brother once did) than try to recreate that work so rather than lick the razor I keep DVDs and another external hard drive (that I update monthly) at work.

I know I’m paranoid when it comes to backups but it would really devestate me to lose everything I’ve worked so hard on so I opt for a little bit of prevention and never have to worry about it.  Two women in my wife’s PEPs group had their hard drives die within two weeks of each other…One had to send her drive out to a data recovery service (more expensive than an external hard drive)…the other lost all her data since the beginning of time.  Yuck!