Backing Up Your Laptop Effectively
For most laptop users, backing up their data is something they do rarely and for most people, this will eventually end in disaster. Think for a minute about the absurdity of this every day situation: You have one computer that holds the great majority of your personal and work data. Some of this data is automatically backed up due to services like gmail.com and Google Docs, but most exists in singular form on that laptop. The laptop contains a spinning drive that has a non trivial chance of failing, especially when moved or jostled. A laptop is also a common target of theft. With all of these risks, data carried on a laptop is almost guaranteed to eventually be lost in one way or another. If you are like most people, the reason you have not lost laptop data yet is purely luck and not due to any skill or effort. It’s a good idea to have a backup plan in place before you lose precious data and not after.
The easiest thing to do is buying an external hard drive and periodically copying over all of your files.
Most people leave this drive at home or work. More paranoid people keep it in a safe or safety deposit box at a bank. Another option is to use an online backup service. These work great because they are usually much more secure than having an extra hard drive sitting around your house. On the other hand, they can be hard to use if you generate a lot of large files like digital photos and video. If you don’t have a plan yet, take the time to do it now in a leisurely way instead of stressing the first time you lose data.