Agile Business Navigator

Backing up is essential. If you haven't done a backup and then you're just a sucker punch away from losing your data. Picture coming in one morning and not having your 1,000 stored emails. All your marketing information is lost. The website you made a change to last week but hadn't uploaded yet. The photos from last years vacation. All gone. To recover your hard drive is estimated at $400 and up.

Let's discuss the alternatives.

1. Easiest solution. Purchase an external backup hard drive and periodically shove over your entire hard drive to it.

2. Backup services. PCWorld has an article on various services. Prices are pretty steap to backup your entire drive, but backing up your data and not worrying about your software installations works for reducing the price.

3. Offsite backup.
Lifehacker has a great post on PC based backup.

Don't expect yourself to remember to back up your data, or stack your closet full of burned CD's or DVD's. Today we're going to set up automated nightly, weekly, monthly local and off-site backups for your PC using free software. Once you get this up and running, you'll never have to worry about losing data again.

4. Homegrown DVD. I use my own script to backup what I've changed that day to an archive (zipped) file. Then at the end of the week I burn a DVD with all the archives. I keep a weekly archive of my email essentials in a separate archive and that goes in with the the bunch onto the DVD.

5. Last on the list is backing up to CDs. Not the greatest solution given that each CD stores less then a Gig. Buy a software package that allows you to select what you'll backup and when. Let it run and do all the work for you.

If you've ever started over with a set of CDs in your hand and a stack of software to reinstall – you've been to Restore Hell.

I don't want to ever go back there.