Your music, movies, and other media are no less important than yourcontact database and business documents, yet we often forget to includethem in our backup plans. Even worse, many of us have no backup plan atall. That’s dangerous. As any seasoned computer jockey will tell you,data loss is not a question of if but when. And if you think backups are a hassle, weigh it against the tragedy of losing all of your music, photos, and videos.
There are plenty of ways to archive all this stuff: optical media (CDsand DVDs), external or secondary hard drives, and even media-friendlyonline backup services such as Streamload. Which option should you use?The safest answer is at least two of them,as it’s always a good idea to have a backup of your backup. Copyingyour valuable files to a safe place can be a hassle, but you can makeit easier on yourself by establishing a consistent backupinterval–say, once every one, three, or six months.
Let’sstart with Streamload. A free account nets you a whopping 25GB ofonline storage space. Just upload your files (be patient–uploads tendto be much slower than downloads) and presto: a safe offsite backup youcan access from any PC. The only hitch with the free account is thatyour download bandwidth is limited to 100MB per month. If disasterstrikes and you need to retrieve all your files, you’ll probably needto upgrade to one of the fee-based accounts, which start at $4.95 per month for unlimited storage and a number of other options.
Backing up to a second hard drive is a fast and easy solution,especially if you use a utility that supports automatic, incrementalbackups; that is, at designated times, only those files that have changed or been added since the last backup will be copied to the drive. We recommend something along the lines of Second Copy, a favorite among Download.com users and a bargain at $29.95. Keep inmind, however, that a backup hard drive is just as susceptible tomechanical failure (and, for that matter, virus and spyware infections)as your primary drive–all the more reason to adopt more than onebackup solution.
Finally, you can take advantage of the CDand/or DVD burner you already own. Blank media is cheap, especially inbulk, and a single CD can hold upward of 150 MP3s. Even if you have tospan your files across multiple discs, it’s still an easy way to create a physical (though not scratchproof) backup, since software can handle splitting up the files between the discs. The latest versions of Ahead Nero and Roxio Easy CD Creator include backup utilities for use with optical media. The aforementioned Second Copy works fine, too.