Imagine for a moment if your computer was stolen today, if your house caught on fire, if lightning hit your home and all of your data was lost, your digital images were gone, your emails, your contacts – gone.

Would you wish you had backed everything up? You’ve thought about it, but just haven’t exactly figured out how to do it and how to keep up with it so it’s not time consuming. Here are some solutions from this week's show: 

The most obvious one in a home environment is backing up to an external hard drive. You can purchase one that will connect to your USB and just periodically back up your documents folder, images and any other files that you would want a back up of.

Here’s a product we recommend. Go to this web site: www.carbonite.com. It is an online backup system. You first install a small program which takes about 30 seconds.

Then you simply back up your entire computer or just your documents folder, images folder etc… It is really simple to use and it can be accessed from anywhere.

The main reason to do this is in the event of:

Theft
Fire
User Error
Hurricane / Tornado
Lightning damage
Other natural disaster
Computer malfunction

You can try it for free for 30 days.

It will take a while to back everything up especially if you have a lot of images. But the great part about this is – the upkeep. Once it’s done – it’s done and it will only back up new documents or the ones you have recently editted. You have unlimited storage however, they do have a 1 file size limit of 500 MB.

It costs $5.00 a month plus an annual fee of $49.95. Not expensive considering how much you’d pay someone to retrieve your documents if your computer was damaged.

This is not recommended for a business environment (we will cover more on that in another show).

There is a disclaimer regarding security for your review.

Another great feature is being able to access your documents from anywhere. So if your house was completely damage by fire or a storm you could purchase a computer, logon and have all of your documents restored or pull up all of your insurance and other important documents.

Other back up options are using USB Drives which can store up to 4 GB. You can lock it up in a safety deposit box. This is a great way to store back up of your insurance information, birth certificates, diplomas, home documents, life insurance, health documents etc…

So don’t procrastinate. You’ll sleep better knowing your data is backed up!