Twenty Something Sense

My oldest memories of using a computer date back over 15 years ago when I used to spend hours shooting bison, rabbits, and deer to help feed my family as we traversed along the Oregon Trail. Since then computers have become a part of my daily life and I have amassed quite a lot of information on my computer that I would be devastated if one day it was lost. Thousands of priceless pictures, every paper I’ve written in college, hundreds or important work documents, contact information for everyone I know, countless hours spent organizing thousands of MP3′s; soft copies of my resume, living will, last will, and tax history; my custom budget sheet, investment sheet, and birthday list; hundreds of videos from college, trips abroad, and family gatherings would be gone forever. I can’t imagine what I would do. Recovering half of this list would just amount to hundreds of hours of work, but the other half I would not be able to replace with any amount of money or effort.

We all know that backing up our computers on a regular basis is important, but I doubt that many actually are diligent about doing so. This is because in the past we did not have so much invested in them. Take digital pictures as an example. When I was a Freshman in College, if I were to lose my hard drive, no big deal because I would only be out a few hundred pictures from that year because we didn’t use digital cameras all too much before that. However, if today I was to lose my hard drive, I would not have a single picture from the last seven years of my life (outside of those I could try to recover from friends and family – a laborious process that won’t yield nearly the results I desire).

The digital picture example can be applied to many aspects of my digital life – the amount of important information that I have only soft copies of has grown tremendously over the last decade. Backing up your computer today is far more important than it was five or ten years ago and should not be taken lightly.

I recommend doing two things to ensure you never lose your digital life:

1) Buy a 500 GB Hard Drive for under $100 that you will make regular backups to and keep in your home. I try to backup my data to this drive at least once a month. This will help protect you in case something should happen to your computer such as a hard drive failure or accidental deletion of data.

2) Buy a second 500 GB Hard Drive for under $100 that you will make periodic backups to and store away from your home, preferably somewhere in a different city. The purpose of this drive is to protect you against unexpected disasters such as a fire, flood, tornado, hurricane, or terrorist act. I store a backup at my mom’s house in Louisville, KY (300 miles from Chicago) and I try to update it at least one time per year.

For under $200 and very little time you can insure your digital life and prevent yourself from losing thousands of priceless items. What other strategies do you guys use? Does anyone exclusively use online storage to backup their data?