Back Up!

Just yesterday, one of my friends' laptop hard drive broke and completely lost it. He wasn't exactly the most tech-savy dude and had a lot of important files on there including pictures, reports, and bank account numbers (which I NEVER recommend you place on your compy alone). Being the not-so-tech-smart man that he is, which I don't blame him for, he didn't even think of buying an external drive or even backing up his stuff on a disk. In fact, he thought that laptops were rock solid and were like desktops, never failing unless you kicked it really, really, really hard.

I just hope that you're never in this situation. To make sure that you don't get yourself in this situation, I reccommend you backup your stuff on disks AND on an external hard drive. why? Becuase I'd hate to say this but laptops have a half life of somewhere between 2-3 years unless you bought some crazy thinkpad (i'm guilty of this, btw) or just never take your laptop off your desk.

Now if you're thinking, hard drives and discs cost money, isn't there an alternative? Well, you're in luck cuz there are a few solutions out there. There is one drawback though, it'll take more time to use it and it doesn't give you much space to work with. For the past few days, I've been ranting on about dropbox which gives you 2 gigs of free online storage. Its a great way to back up your files. On top of that, theres sky drive which also gives out storage. If you're willing to pay just a little cash, carbonite is a really good backup place to put all your stuff. Other things your could try is e-mailing yourself in gmail but thats a real hassle. Another way to do it is if you already have another computer. Then all you gotta do is just transfer the files between the computers (again, you can use dropbox).

Important!!! you don't delete the file off your computer after you've backed it up. The purpose is to have TWO copies of the file in TWO different places so if one goes bad, you have another.