"There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who have experienced catastrophic hard drive failure, and those who *will* experience catastrophic hard drive failure."
Someone quoted this in Jeff Atwood's What's your backup strategy, which is so true. Sooner or later, you will be facing the disaster caused by fragile hard drive. Knocking on the wood if you are trying to say you haven't. So if you don't have any backup plan yet, it's time to think about it very seriously. Even though you already have one in place, it's time to review to see if it's still effective. Or unless you are "lucky" like Raelyn Campbell who filed $54m lawsuit against Best Buy for losing laptop, you would be screwed if one day you so rely-on hard drive fails on you.
So what choices out there are available for us as personal use? Well, basically it's all based on what you need and how much data you want to be backed up. Some cost might be necessary needed in some cases.
First of all, buy an external hard drive, pick as much space as you can afford or pick the one like WD Passport that doesn't require power supply if you want to carry it around.
Then, configure your sync tool and either manually run it once a week or so or schedule it to be run regularly if possible. There are many sync choices out there but I am using and quite happy with Microsoft's SyncToy which is free, easy to use. It never failed on me. The con, though, is that it doesn't come with the schedule feature so I have to run it manually.
However, if you prefer to use tool that is more like backup, you might end up having to buy a commercial copy as Windows built-in backup tool usually doesn't work too good. The one in XP is ok but Vista is much worse. And I wasn't so lucky to find any good free ones either. Jeff's choice on Acronis True Image looks pretty good, which backs up the system to a bootable mirror image of the hard drive, that can be booted up later on when the primary one fails.
Going one step further, if you want to have a backup stored offsite, rather than at home, MozeHome is definitely the number one choice. It's free for under 2G data which should cover most of the cases, and it lightly runs on your computer and backs up your data without your attention once it's configured.
If you have more than 2G data, the chances are you might have a lot of photos included that you also want to back up. If that's the case, then you have to consider Flickr or SmugMug as your plan. Both are really popular photo gallery sites that offers so much rich features for photos but be prepared to pay to get the full services that you can store the full original size of your photos over there.
Right, we have yet covered Video. YouTube or sites that office the similar service seems to be the only choices at the moment. Getting your Videos backed up offsite will be a really time consuming job though.
Overall, MozeHome rules all, it's the best and easiest choice to the backup problem that everyone faces. Oh, how about emails? I will be covering it in my next post...haha...it's too late now.