Well here we go again, a user comes to me and in the process of a afternoon, inadvertently cuts and past away their "My Documents" folder. One way or another the files are deleted off the USB hard driver and poof the files are gone. We're taking about thousands of digital pictures, Itunes music. and assorted other items. I'm going over the USB drive with some of the popular undelete programs, but some of the files are not recoverable. Here's some tips to help in backing up personal files on your local machine.
1. Buy a USB hard drive: Some of the new models can back up a couple hundred GB very quickly. I copy my entire "My document folder every couple weeks to my home drive. Most of these drives come with free back up software to help with the process.
2. Get a Picasa or Flickr account to upload and save your best pictures. I currently pay about $20 for 10GB of space a year.
3. Start getting in the cloud: Time to start moving the personal stuff to cloud computing. Start to look for a place to store your documents online, so you can access them from any computer. Here is a list of the following items I use in the "Cloud" currently.
- Google Bookmarks: Via Google Toolbar, so nice not to worry about syncing my bookmarks from multiple machines.
- Evernote: Nice way to keep my web clippings and notes. I can also retrieve them with my Windows Mobile phone.
- Google Docs: Let's face it, the simple letter and spreadsheet can be created and stored online. My wife and I work on blog posts using the built in collaboration with Google Docs.
- Gmail: With a huge storage capacity and in my opinion the best e-mail client around, its easy to store information with Gmail.
- Offsite backup: Just because you have a USB hard drive, don't think that these things can't fail at anytime or get stolen along with your notebook or desktop. We use Ibackup at $100 dollars per year (10GB) to back up my wife's business files. There are numerous options, and the price keeps getting lower and lower each year.
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