Backing up your computer

If you are like most people your computer holds a lot of things that aren't easy to replace. Music, family pictures, movies, personal finance information, your saved game from level 80 on dungeons and dragons . What happens if your computer dies? If your hard drive crashes there's a good chance that the data is not going to be recoverable.

You have a few options:

1. You could buy an external hard drive and make backups of your data to the hard drive.

2. You could sign up for a service that offers off site backups. Mozy and Carbonite are both pretty cheep. For about $5.00 a month you can backup all your data to their offsite data centers.

3. If you don't want pay to use a service like Mozy or Carbonite, but like the idea of having all your data backed up off site in case your house decides to take a Wizard Of Oz trip then I would check out CrashPlan.

CrashPlan is free for personal use and works two different ways. You can use it to backup to a locally attached USB hard drive or another computer in your house. The second way is really cool. You can install an agent on a remote computer anywhere on the internet and back your data up to that computer. This gives you the ability to backup your data to a family or friends computer. If you decide to do this I would buy an external hard drive and give it to the person that's going to be your backup buddy.

Three final notes about CrashPlan.

You can choose to encrypt the backup so that you don't have to worry about any of your information being compromised while in transit over the internet or at your backup buddy's place.

The free version allows you to backup up to 10 computers so if you own multiple computers you can back them all up.

Finally CashPlan works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. So not mater what OS your using it's got you covered.