As a professional PC Tech, I come across countless customers who have gigabytes of important data (files, pictures) on three year old computers and no data backup strategy in place. Every week I have a customer who’s hard drive has completely died and they want me to get the data back. Unfortanatly most of the time a mechanically dead hard drive is not recoverable, unless sent to a specialty data recovery service, which costs between $1000-$2000 dollors to recover the files.

I usually recommend an online service called Carbonite instant backup. Carbonite monitors and stores data online up to their servers, in a relatively intrusive process. Here are the steps to using Carbonite:

1. Download the software and install it.
2. Tell Carbinite what files or drives to backup
3. Carbonite will make an initial backup of your files
4. Carboite will then monitor your files and watch for any changes
5. If your hard drive dies, reinstall Carbonite on the new hardrive and tell Carbonite which files to recover

Pros

• Cheap ($50 dollars a YEAR)
• Ease of Use
• Encrypts files before uploading them
• Backs up file when you are not using the Internet

Cons

• Initial backup takes around two weeks