There’s No Excuse for Not Backing Up Your Computer

When your computer’s hard drive fails, it can be gut-wrenching. At best, maybe you lost a really important presentation you were working on. At worst, maybe you’ve lost every photo of your kid’s childhood. Sometimes, you can recover that data yourself —but often, it’s gone forever (unless you want to pay a lot of money to get it back). Every hard drive fails one day. Backup service Backblaze says 50% fail after only four years . Save yourself the trouble and start backing up your computer now.

Many of you have probably already experienced this once. And those of you that haven’t…well, you just haven’t yet. It’s a scary thought, but it doesn’t have to be. Backing up isn’t just for computer geeks with lots of data—it’s something each and every one of us needs.

You generally have two choices when it comes to backup. You can:

• Back up to the internet (recommended) with a program like Crashplan or Backblaze. This is preferred. It’s very easy to set up , and ensures that your data is kept safe even if your house catches fire or gets burgled.
• Back up to an external drive with Windows 7 Backup , Windows 8’s File History , or OS X’s incredibly simple-to-use Time Machine . You can also back up to an external drive with Crashplan, as described above. External drives are okay, but this method won’t protect you in case of fire or theft. If you do this, you should still back up your most important files to an online service like Dropbox.

Check out the guides linked above for instructions on how to set up each method. Heck, it’s even a good idea to have multiple backups if you really want to keep that data safe. But at least have one.

via lifehacker