Last week we had a tragedy in the Brain household. Our “main” hard disk died. We have six people in our family, and a total of seven computers on our network. The hard disk in the “main computer” died. This is a tragedy because the “main computer” is the one that houses all of our family files, most importantly the 47,000+ photos and videos of the Brain kids growing up (but also financial records, business records, book manuscripts, etc.). The “main computer” then shares those files with all the other computers in the house so that everyone can access them whenever they want to.

Fortunately this turned out to be only a time tragedy rather than a family-memory tragedy. It took a lot of time to replace that hard disk. It was not a memory tragedy because there was a backup from the night before and we lost none of our files. If there had not been a backup copy, there would be nothing left of those 47,000 plus photos (and all the other files on that hard disk).

Which brings up a good question – have you backed up your computer lately, and if not, what’s the best way to do it? Let’s take a look.

There are three ways for you to back up your hard disk: 1) You can manually back it up to an external hard drive, 2) You can get an external hard drive that will automatically back it up, or 3) You can back it up on the Internet. There are advantages and disadvantages to all three.

In the case of the Brain family, we use option 2. I bought an external hard drive, and it came with software that backs up the “main computer’s” hard disk automatically. If you want to go this route, go to a store and look at the different external hard drive options. Here are the options available at Best Buy and Newegg as examples:
- Best Buy’s external hard drive selection
- Newegg’s external hard drive selection

If an external hard drive comes with software for backups, the box will talk about it. The question you will have to answer is, how big of an external drive do you need? This depends on how many files you have on your hard disk, which you can easily discover using the Windows Explorer (right click on your documents folder and choose the Properties option). Let’s say that you have 100 GB of files in your documents folder. A 500 GB external hard drive would be plenty big, and these only cost about $70 right now.

So you get home, plug the external hard drive into your computer, spend a couple minutes setting up the software, start the backup process and bang – your files get backed up. If you set a schedule, your files get backed up every day. Some drives (example: My Book Essential) will even back up files the instant you create or modify them.

This is great – an external hard drive will handle the case of a hard drive crash. But it does not handle the case of something like a lightning strike. A lightning strike will destroy everything plugged into the wall, including your computer and the backup drive. To eliminate this vulnerability you want an external backup drive that you unplug and keep in a safe place. Buy a second external hard drive and use it for this purpose. You can back up your files manually – simply select your documents folder and drag it over to the external hard drive folder after you plug the drive into your machine. When your computer is done copying all of the files, unplug the drive and move it to a safe place.

That works well, but what if your house burns down? You may want to keep a third external hard disk at a trusted friend’s or relative’s home, or in a safe deposit box at the bank. This is called an off-site backup. You might swap it out only once a week or once a month, but it is better than not having one. Or there may be a company in your area that specializes in off-site backups

These external hard drives are starting to sound like a pain in the neck, aren’t they? To be adequately protected you need two or three of them and you have to rotate them periodically to maintain a current off site backup. That is why Internet backup services have become so popular. You pay a monthly or annual fee, and your backup is kept with a company on the Internet. Your computer backs itself up automatically through your Internet connection and you never have to worry about lightning strikes or house fires. A number of companies sell these services, including Carbonite, Norton, Idrive, Mozy and many others. Here are some reviews of the different services available:
- The Best Online Backup Services – “Nine out of ten of you probably don’t back up your personal data daily. Chances are excellent that you’ll regret it someday. Given how simple and inexpensive online backup has become, you’ll only have yourself to blame.”
- PC Magazine provides up-to-date coverage and product reviews of backup software

There are advantages to these online services, like the fact that you can then access your files anywhere in the world once they are backed up.

The only disadvantage of these Internet services is that most home Internet connections are fairly slow. There is no way (as far as I know) to use these services if you have more than 20 or 30 GB of data (and if you have 30 GB of data, it may take more than a month to back it all up the first time). If you are in the less-than-30GB ballpark, however, Internet backup services are a very easy and safe way to protect all of your data.

Whatever you do, do something. Especially if you are working on a laptop that you cart around with you on a regular basis. The probability of dropping it or losing it is pretty high. Without a backup you could lose it all.

This video looks at the advantages of tape as a backup option for large-scale data storage (terabytes):

If you have Windows 7, you can use the built-in backup utility to help with backups if you like:

See also “The Best Methods to Back up your Hard drive”, which discusses network attached storage as an option:

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