How-To: Cheap or free data backup solutions

The back up solutions I'm going to discuss apply to individuals with personal data, such as your documents, music, photos, settings, contacts and anything else you may value on your computer.  It's really not too hard to back things up once you're in the habit.  If you're like me, you'll find a way to back things up without having to do any real work.  While my configuration probably only applies to a small percentage of people, I have several other solutions I've given people that work just as well.

Reasons for Data Loss

Think...  What are the ways I can lost my data?  I'll list a few right now. 

The quickest and easiest way to lose everything is a spontaneous hard drive crash.  I don't care what model of hard drive you bought and how much it cost or what technology it uses.  It will crash eventually.  I've had the best drives made crash within a year of purchase.  I've also had the cheapest drives last for 7 years non-stop.  There's no way to know how it will go down.

I've had a power surge wreck everything in my PC.  That's right, everything.  This was WITH a surge protector.  Those surge protectors work ok for small spikes but if your building is hit by lighting or you have a massive power spike, which do happen, they are worthless.  Everything in your PC, including your hard drive, can fry with just one jolt.

If you have children, you must remember that they know no boundaries as to the sensitivity of your hardware.  They can easily knock a laptop off a table by pulling on the cable or they can fall into your PC, knocking it over or off the desk.  Physical damage can wreck a hard drive in no time flat and it happens much easier than you may think.  I can remember off-hand seeing 2 people's laptop hard drives get wrecked by the laptop falling off a surface and 2 PCs getting kicked or bumped into while running which is hard enough to kill the drive.

The ultimate worst scenario though is theft or flood/fire.  If your house/apartment/condo is broken in to and all of your gear is stolen, that's immediate loss.  If there is a fire which consumes your residence or a flood which raises over the level of your goods, you're done.  Read the section on off-line data storage to address these concerns.

On-Site Data Backup

My configuration is simple.  I have 2 PCs each with equivalent hard drive capacity.  Every week one of my PCs copies everything over to the other one.  This way under most circumstances I can recover my data if something goes wrong.  It's simple, easy and effective.  The only problem is that in the rare case that the hard drives in both PCs get zapped, I'm out of luck.  It also doesn't cover against theft, flood or fire.  If you have the extra hardware sitting around and are willing to buy an extra internal drive or two, which are fairly inexpensive, this is the first decent line of defense.  Most operating systems support a simple backup, including Windows.   Microsoft has put together a simple tutorial for using their free XP backup system.

If you have a laptop and have it home most of the time, backing up onto a networked drive is another great solution.  You can often times hide the drive in a different location of the house, especially if it has Wi-Fi, which will hopefully keep it from getting stolen even if the rest of your home is rummaged.  Just configure the drive on the network and use the same free backup system pointed out earlier to automatically back up.  You can also just manually copy all the files over once a week if that suits you better.  All you need is what's referred to as a Networked Hard Drive.  The drive will usually have 10/100/1000 ethernet (meaning 10, 100 or 1000 megabit, the bigger the number the faster the transfer) and/or it will have Wi-Fi.  Buy what works for your network and follow the instructions provided to get it up and running.

On-Site/Off-Site Solutions

Burning your data to DVDs works if you have less than 9GB of data to back up.  A standard dual-layer burner and disc can be used to perform this task.  Most people that have a lot of data have much more, largely due to MP3 collections and 6-7 megapixel photos, which take up almost 4 megabytes each.  Blu-Ray is still a rather expensive solution but offers 30GB recordable per disc.  Either DVD or Blu-Ray once burned can be brought to the office, work or a friend or family members house for storage.  If this sounds like a lot of work, just do it once every month to ensure you don't lose years of precious data (think of your children!  You want to preserve those photos!)

Tape backup is another more expensive solution that most people can't afford.  It's the primary back up solution for businesses because of storage capacity (400GB/tape, etc..).  It's a much bigger undertaking to start using and is beyond the scope of this article.

Purely Off-Site Solutions

There are now many data hosting solutions which will allow you to back up your data over the internet for a fairly low rate.  I highly recommend going this route.  It is the most convenient and safest way to back up your data.  How it generally works is:  You subscribe to their service.  They give you some software to install and run on your PC.  The software automatically synchronizes your data with the provider every night or week, guaranteeing you always have a current back-up available.  You generally pay per GB used there and some definitely cost more than others.  This isn't the easiest thing to do if you often times have your computer off or are a very mobile user, but it's certainly the most reliable method if you are bad about performing backups and want to ensure you're covered for all scenarios.  A little search in Google will help you find the right internet-based backup solution provider.

Backups on-the-go

Laptops seem to be all the rage now and there are many people traveling, living purely off of their laptop.  While the other solutions are a little more difficult to manage in this case, you can at least pick up one of the latest generations of USB-powered super-small portable hard drives.  Western digital makes a version called the passport which I really like.  It has a tiny footprint and currently offers 160GB of storage.  They are very light and can be carried with you anywhere you go.  Just plug these in once a week to make a copy of anything important and you've at least saved yourself from standard data loss.