Phrase of the Year so far: Back Up

I wish I had a deeply insightful post to kick off the New Year, but I don’t. Two weeks in Hawaii followed immediately by two weeks of a holiday/food/cottage/single malt coma has resulted in a dearth of quality posts from me despite all the good stuff going on right now. I’ll get to something good soon.

In the mean time, this post is very tactical. While I was away my computer was stolen and if weren’t for my automatic, hourly backups to an external drive I would be in serious trouble. Thankfully this whole experience will only cost me a few hundred dollars and a few hours of my time.

The message to my legions of loyal followers is this: Get an external drive if you don’t have one and set it to AUTOMATICALLY back up your data. No DVD’s, no plug in hard drives every 6 weeks when you remember. Dedicated disk, automatic backups. It’s the only way to go.

The other only way to go is online backups. I’m just lucky my backup drive wasn’t stolen too. I’ll be adding an online backup solution, such as mozy.com to be doubly safe.

Let me ask you this: If all of your data was stolen and I said to you, “Would you pay $150 to have all of your stuff magically re-appear?” you would probably nod enthusiastically. That’s what it costs to buy a network drive with the right software.

So that’s my first message for ’09…back up your stuff!