Backup Your Data Beat the Hard Drive Crash Blues
Published on December 20, 2011
Losing your laptop/tablet/smartphone is only slightly worse than a crashed hard drive. The former requires you purchasing new hardware (or going without), but both leave you feeling dark and empty inside. Lost photos of your children/wedding/best vacation ever, missing address book information, and years of work down the drain... Its the worst. The worst, Jerry.
Usually it takes a corrupted, crashed, stolen, or lost hard drive to convince the average human of the importance of backing up. If you're lucky enough to never have had this happen to you, please heed my warning. The remedy is darned easy, you'll really hate yourself if you stop reading now.
We've previously extolled the virtues of backing up to the cloud, specifically using Dropbox (one of our Favorite Things). Well one of our favorite websites, Lifehacker did us a solid with a How To on backing up your data locally and remotely (a.k.a. "in the cloud").
It's not a matter of whether your computer's disk will stop working; it's a matter of when. The question is how much it will disrupt your life—and it won't, if you have a backup copy.
Backing up your data is the dullest but most indispensable thing you do on your computer. Here's how to automate regular backups for your computer...
If you do one thing today, sign up for a Crashplan-type solution. If you embrace the whole article, great. If you decide buying an external hard drive and installing some software is more work than its worth (hint: it isn't), at least get the set-it-and-forget-it remedy to avoiding those dark days of data loss.