Backup your data

Today I’ve been busy setting up my son’s computer after a disk crash. I got the laptop back today, and have been “tech support daddy” as I setup the files, setup OpenDNS, reinstall Office, and restore his files from backup.

Computer hardware fails. We know this, and we should plan for it. I can recover my son’s files because I backed them up. You should use backup software. Mac and Windows computers come with backup software, though you have to plug in external drives to do it. That’s OK, but the best kind of backup is the kind that just works all the time and you don’t have to worry about it.

The “set and forget” kind of backup backs up over the network. You can backup to another one of yours (or your friends) computers with crashplan for free. Or you can backup to the cloud with crashplan, mozy, spideroak, or carbonite. There are others out there, you can use alternativeto.net to find them. Take a look at them and figure out what works best for you.

I like spideroak because they’re zero knowledge. That means that all of your data is encrypted with your password before it goes out on the network to their servers. This means that they can’t decrypt your information. Good for privacy.

Again, I’m not being paid for this. I’m a happy user of 2 of these products, and you should do something to protect your computer files.

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