There are plenty of ways to secure and backup your documents today. And everyone should get in the habit of protecting their data. Trust me when I say, your hard drive will fail. So, don't wait until that 500 page manuscript turns into digital dust. I backup my data on external hard drives, CD/DVD media and recently online with services from Dropbox and Jungle Disk. And thanks to my wonderful wife, who by the way controls my gadget budget, I now backup remotely to USB drives using the PogoPlug. This method is commonly referred to as Network Attached Storage (NAS).
Backing up your documents or any other file is easy, you just need a plan and the time to do it. Here are a few tips and recommended services to get you started. First, identify how much storage you will need. If you don't create a lot of data, then most basic online storage plans will work fine. These plans usually start with 5gb of storage. And it's absolutely free. Now, if you create mountains of data, then you will have to pay for more storage. In the free category, I like Dropbox. Dropbox gives you 2gb of free storage and you can sync all your data across multiple computers, Mac and Linux included. Microsoft offers Live Mesh (5gb free) and Skydrive (25bg free). JungleDisk is another service that charges $2 per month plus .15 cents per gb of storage you use. You can also use the basic features in your operating system. For Windows, you can use the backup feature found in system tools. For Mac, Time Machine is your option.
Since I do a lot of cloud computing with web applications such as Zoho, Adobe Buzzword, Backpack and Evernote, I have begun looking at backing up all of my online documents and projects with other online services. Backupify, formerly know as LifeStream, will backup accounts from Twitter, Wordpress, Facebook, Flickr, and Google Docs to name a few. My poor man's favorite at the moment is my PogoPlug that I mentioned earlier. A Pogoplug is a small low powered device that allows you to connect any USB drive to it and create instant online storage. As long as you have a broadband connection, you have access to your data and can upload, view, share and download any file you like. Thanks Dear!!!
So, now you have no excuse to protect your data. Go and backup the world!
Dropbox
JungleDisk
Backupify
Pogoplug
Evernote
PlugComputer
