A few months ago, I had the unfortunate experience of a hard drive crash in my laptop. It was a fairly new laptop, so I had very little data on it, which was lucky, but, since is was fairly new, I also hadn’t had a chance to back it up.

It took me at least a week to get the thing back to where I wanted it, with all the sortware I wanted, all the tweaks I liked, and any settings that make Windows Vista tolerable to work on in a demanding environment. (that’s a whole different post altogether…).

Anyway, long story short, it was a horrible mess, even with a limited amount of data on it, and at least some data already backed up on a separate drive.

It’s amazing how much people live on their computers now! Family photos, e-mail, resumes, important documents, critical work/business files…you name it.

There are many solutions out there for backing up on both a file level, and a complete computer level.

On an image level, you can back up your entire computer, including operating system, settings, applications, pretty much a snapshot of your computer at the time you take the image! For this, in a Windows envrironment, I use Acronis’ TrueImage, which does a great job. I hear that iBackup is a pretty good solution for Mac users. But I’m not an Apple guy, so take this with a grain of salt. These applications both back up your image to a hard drive or physical location, so it’s still susceptible to physical damage.

If you’re just looking for just a file level backup, you may want to look at an online service. This way, your data is available from anywhere, and if your house burns down, everything is off-site, safe, and secure. Something like www.carbonite.com is about $5 USD per month, and works in the background, backing things up as you change them!