Do you backup . . . at home?
My recommendations:
- For those things that would be really hard to replace (family photos, important documents, etc.), back them up online. A good choice is Carbonite.They offer unlimited storage for about $50 / year.
- For those things that would be a real pain to replace (e.g. your whole hard drive), I recommend Windows Home Server. You can get the "Release Candidate" for free (it's still in Beta). I've been using the product for several months now and it works well. Once it's set up it will automatically backup all the local drives on your network. It can be set to store as many copies of the backups as you like. For this, you will need an old machine dedicated to it.
- If you do the first two, you will be way ahead of most folks. If you want to really sleep at night, I have one final recommendation. Buy a portable USB drive, backup everything to it, and store it either at another location or in a fireproof box. For this, I like to use Drive SnapShot to make copies of my critical drives on a regular basis.
With hard drives, it not a matter of if but when they will crash. Add to that the threat of malware and it's hard to argue against having a solid backup scheme.
So . . . backup! If you do, you'll get more rest. And . . . in the event of a crash, you will look like a hero!
For those who already backup: what do you recommend?




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