Tech Blog

[#1]

I bang the back up monkey a lot.  There's really no excuse for not doing it.  If you treasure your media files, documents and everything you do on your computer, you need to be making copies before it needlessly disappears into the ether.

And it can easily happen with a power bump, fire, theft or a crazy toddler banging on your keyboard.  Losing files is a reality in our digital era, making a back up is the only way to ease the pain.

Previously I told you about Carbonite , burning to disc and using the cloud for backup.  Today, some more solutions to add to your backup army.

External Drives

There are dozens of models that for around $100 can store everything you've ever done with your computer and still have space for another eternity of file creation.

I like to use a tiny portable drive to keep all my media files archived so I can take them between computers to edit.  Once you dump all your cds into iTunes , making a backup on an external drive means you can easily upload music between computers.

Backupify

Moving your data into the cloud is a great way to avoid issues with theft or fire or hardware meltdown on your local system, but it doesn't mean they're fully protected. Backupify is a great way to backup the data you put in to GMail , Google Docs , Flickr , Twitter and Facebook .

I like the Twitter backup the best, since you can only access 3200 updates through the Twitter timeline.  I use Twitter to archive things my toddler says, and with Backupify , I can make sure I can access every silly sentence that comes out of his mouth for years to come.

I use Google Docs to write many articles and toss all my photos to Flickr . Backupify now gives me a third party storage system to make sure the data is accessible even if the original hosts go down or are compromised.

2GB of storage on Backupify is free, after that they move to a premium model (which is free during SXSW starting this weekend)

The moral of the story? Back that thing up.

catch the buzz .. pass it on.

[#2]

As mentioned in previous threads.... I like the simplicity of Drobo as an external hard drive for backing up my files.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05yqvb5n36M