Think Local

The first thing you'll want is some kind of local backup. A local backup will allow you to have quick access to your data if something goes wrong, like a hard drive crash or an accidental Delete key pressed at the wrong moment. It should be thought of as your first line of defense.

This can take a couple different forms, an external hard drive, another computer, or, my current favorite, a Drobo.

You may be tempted to think that you can just work off the external drive since you'll still be safe if your computer crashes. Unless you're using a Drobo, which I will talk about in a post soon, I don't recommend this. If the external hard drive crashes, you've still lost all of your data. The key is to keep more than one copy of your data. If one goes, you're still safe.

Act Remote

Local backups are great, but they have a terrible flaw, they're local. If you have a fire or other natural disaster, you'll still lose all your data because it's all right next to each other. That's why you need a backup that lives in a different location than your computer.

A good remote backup should be inexpensive and easy to use. There are many options out there to choose from, some of my favorites being JungleDisk and DropBox, but some that work better on Mac and others that work better on Windows. Whichever you choose, it should be inexpensive and integrate with your operating system to be easy to automate.

Guidelines

There are a couple of guidelines to help figure out your backup plan.

1. Automated

   Your backups should be automated and should require no intervention on your part most of the time. The less you have to mess with it to keep it going, the more likely you'll keep using it.

2. Inexpensive

   It should be cheap. Other than an initial outlay of cash for an external hard drive or two and a program to automate the backups, any future costs should be cheap or nothing.

3. Plan for recovery

   You should have a plan on how you'd recover your data during a small loss (accidentally deleting a file), a hard drive loss, and a natural disaster loss. You should know exactly what you need to do to get everything up and running again and any passwords or logins you need for your remote backups.

Next Steps

In the future, I'll be reviewing and talking about some of the options you can use for local and remote backups. But if you don't already have some kind of backup plan set up, you should get something going soon. You can always change and adapt as you go. Even if it's as simple as writing really important stuff to CDs, please do it now.

The key to all of this is, keep multiple copies of your data and keep copies in multiple locations. If you can achieve those two goals, it's probably a good backup plan.

I'll soon talk about my set up and other options that you can use for a remote and a local backup.