Protect your data!

Just thought I would give you a tech tip for today!  Most everyone lives in a digital world these days I know we have our entire kids lives on disk from the time they were 3 or 4 until now and it would be irreplaceable if we lost all of those pictures and memories!  So what can you do?

Here is what we have done.  We have an external hard drive where we store all of our data as one line of protection.  If the Operating System freaks out or the internal hard drive crashes we have all of our data on an external drive.  To add another level of protection you can use AllWaySync (***Free product***) to sync your internal hard drive with your external hard drive in real time.  This gives you the data in two places.  This is a great protection plan however it does have limitations.  If there is a fire, or theft of your PC then both drives and data are gone!  So the next step is to get all of that data offsite.  I highly recommend Mozy.  This will copy your data from your hard drive to a data center.  For home use you get UNLIMITED storage for $5 a month.  You can not beat that!  So we have over 100GB of data offsite and protected.  If your hard drive crashes, is stolen, or you have some sort of other disaster then your data is safe and sound.  You can restore one file at a time if you delete something you didn't mean to or you can have them overnight you DVD's of your data.

So your data flow would look like this:
Internal Hard drive on your PC through  AllWaySync to your External Hard drive through Mozy to the offsite storage.  Both of these are set and forget programs meaning you set them up once and then they work in the background.