Almost every individual owns a computer whether it is a desktop, laptop, pocket pc or some other electronic device that holds information. This information could be documents, music, videos, personal files, etc... We are living in an information world. Information is a Processed Data which is real MONEY. That is why companies like Google are growing so fast and successfully. I am so happy companies like Google are processing and organizing our personal data, email, documents, photos, videos for free. In addition to what Google and other companies processing and backing up our information on the web we also need to back up our own important and critical information to other secure places. Especially if you are using any type of Windows flavored operating system, there is a possibility of operating system being crashing and taking your data with it. So many people are facing data loss everyday. People loose their photo albums, account information and critical data everyday. First of all, even if your computer crashes there is always a recovery methods. Information Technology Specialists might be able to recover your data if your hard drive still responds to commands. Even than there are companies who can retrieve and recover data from a burned hard drive. These data recovery processes could take days and a could cost a lot of money. But why do you even want to get to that point? Start thinking to get an external hard drive and backup your information daily, weekly, monthly, etc...

Depending on your needs, you could go ahead and buy an external USB hard drive, NAS storage or even JBOD. If you own a small business or have multiple computers at home, I recommend getting an external hard drive with Ethernet connection which could be used as NAS drive. Just like a computer, your NAS drive will be connected to your router and get dynamic IP address from your router and act like a real computer, which you have access to it from anywhere within your network reaches (even from outside of network if you configure your router well). This IP address could be configured as static or dynamic and device will be accessible by anyone within the same network. Some of these drives also support remote access from anywhere even if your ISP does not assign you static IP. The second choice is buying an external USB hard drive which will do the job anyways. The difference between a NAS drive and external usb would be connectivity. NAS drive will be always there, even if your computers are off. USB drive will be only accessible to your network only if it is shared and only if that sharing computer is online. JBOD's (Just Bunch Of Disks) is more likely for midsize companies and for their networks.(not for home use) What you should be backing up? Some of these external USB drives come with their own software and they do allow you to backup entire disk volume with compression, encryption or both. Or you have to manually drag and drop files and folders to it. and you can schedule these files and folders to be backed up daily, weekly or monthly. If you are planning to backup files and folders yourself, make sure not to back up your Program Files. Just back up your documents, videos, personal files, photos, music, favorites, etc... So in case of any kind of crash to your computer, you still need to recover your operating system, but at least you can retrieve back your important data from your external drive. For now most popular drives are Maxtor and Seagate for USB. Simpletech and Maxtor for NAS. If you don't want to spend too much money, you could buy an external usb enclosure and SATA or PATA disk to be put in the enclosure, you could make your own external drive. You could even buy an NAS enclosure case and put more than 1 Hard disk on the enclosure and create your own Network Attached Storage. After all, without configuring your computers to be backed up daily, weekly or monthly your job is not finished. I have met people who has external drives but they are so lazy to install the software and schedule backups. They only realize the importance of data protection when their computer crashes. I have 3 more words to say it.
BACKUP...BACKUP...BACKUP...

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- Tolga Tohumcu
Author, Technology Today
Tolga@lieconomy.com