And a good thing, too.

Yesterday, I was talking about how I got lucky with a computer crash and how that luck was based on preparation.  So, today, I thought I’d tell you a little bit about what those preparations were—and are.

First, hang on to all installation disks.  If you download a program from the internet, copy the installation file to a CD or a DVD.  And don’t forget the operating system.  My laptop has a built-in system recovery feature.  A portion of the hard drive is set aside to store the installation files.  That wasn’t anything I did.  That’s how it came.  It’s not my preferred method, though, because who is to say the drive itself won’t crash.  Often, a disabled hard drive can be resuscitated by a complete reformat.  At that point, you’d need the installation disks.  In my case, there are no disks for the operating system.  I won’t make that mistake with any future purchase.  A recovery partition is great.  I won’t turn it down.  But I want the installation disks for the operating system, too.

Second, backup all your data.  All your word processing documents, all your videos, all your photos, all your databases, spreadsheets, everything.  Back it up twice.  Keep one backup offsite, if possible.  Sure, a set in your desk drawer is great if your hard drive crashes.  What if your house burns down?

I used to leave a backup at my mom’s house.  Hard drives got bigger, and it became impractical, both in terms of time spent and DVDs used.  Now, I use Carbonite.  For a low yearly fee, Carbonite backs up a single local hard drive to their remote servers.  If you change a file, a new version gets backed up.  It happens in the background.  After the initial backup, it happens quickly, quietly and without slowing down your computer.  I highly recommend it.  (Just remember it’s not an archive service.  What Carbonite is doing is synchronizing your hard drive with files on their server.  If you delete something, they will too—after a specified period, of course, because what good’s a backup if you can’t restore things you’ve accidentally erased?)

I also use Second Copy.  It works in much the same way as Carbonite, except that it’s making a local copy—to an internal or external drive or to another PC on your network.  There’s no yearly fee.  You buy the software, install it, and that’s it (unless you decide to upgrade to a newer version at some point).  I use it to synchronize the files on my laptop with those on my desktop machine as well as to make a backup to an external USB drive.

At any given moment, I’ve got three copies of my data in my office and one in the cloud.  Could I still lose it all?  Sure.  But, at that point, I think we’re all gonna have bigger problems.

My point—and my tip for this Tuesday—is that bits and bytes are fragile.  Do you know where your backups are?