Securing Your Digital Life

Photos, documents and written communication have all gone digital,
largely to everyone’s benefit. Digital documents are quicker to send
and need less storage space than physical files. But a paperless world
comes with its own problems.

When a system crashes or a computer breaks, important e-mails,
documents and photographs can be destroyed. According to the FBI, one
laptop is stolen every 53 seconds, leaving computer owners without
their family photographs or financial files. Thirty-one percent of PC
users have lost all of their files through no fault of their own. Every
15 seconds, another hard drive crashes. Yet, despite these looming
threats, an Interactive Data Corporation report shows that only 1.3
percent of consumers currently use some type of data backup.

With the increased use of laptops, more computer users are
beginning to realize they cannot afford to leave their personal and
professional digital files unprotected. With the advancement of the
online data-storage industry, data protection has become more affordable
and user-friendly.

There are several ways to approach backing up your data. You can buy an external or portable hard drive to make a copy of your data. (See my post “Protecting Your Memories”) Hard drives are so cheap these days, its certainly affordable. 

The other route you can go is to use an online solution.  Amazon has a service called Amazon S3. It costs about $.15 per GB and gets cheaper the more you use.  Mozy and Carbonite are good options.  A new service I just heard about recently is called BackBlaze.  Mozy, Carbonite, and Backblaze all cost around $5 a month.  The advantage of online storage is that your backup is offsite, which is very important because if your computer is stolen or house burns down, you still have a backup.