Face it, you will one day lose the data in your computer.

Your hard drive will break, you’ll lose your laptop, your data will be corrupted. Something bad will happen. It’s just a matter of when.Photographs, calendars, music, financial records GONE.  Just like that.

There are all kinds of ways to back up data. You can burn CD’s or DVD’s (which is time consuming and requires your presence), you can back up to an online service (which can be expensive – and sometimes time consuming depending on your connection), you can back up to flash memory or an external hard drive.

Or you can buy one of these babies.  The Buffalo Drive Station Duo.

For less than $250.00 you can have a storage device that will write your data to two completely independent hard drives.  If one crashes, the other is still fine – and you are alerted to the problem by a red light.

It comes with backup software that works great or you can buy my favorite – Acronis True Image – that makes perfect mirrors of your hard drive so restoration is just one step – applications and all.  You can also easily back up media files, outlook files, etc.

It will make backups according to a schedule and without your attention.

The only negative is that if your computer is always next to the backup drives, then while you have

brilliantly protected yourself against mechanical problems, you would still be lost in case of fire or flood.  

To protect against that, you might want to do what I do and make a third backup to a small hard drive once each week or so that you then keep somewhere else.

Everyone that uses a computer will suffer a data tragedy at some point – and with more and more of our lives depending on the unfailing reliability of a spinning hard drive platter, it makes good sense to be careful.

Marc Bluestone