Strapped-4-Cache's post about his stolen computers and a few other folk's bad fortunes recently spurred me to put up a reminder to all about PC backups.

As an IT type I am very conscious of doing backups. While more and more people are backing up their home PCs, a lot of them do not think about where they put their backups.

With the cost of external hard drives taking a big nose dive, you should seriously think about investing in an external drive, back up your data onto that drive and store it somewhere OTHER than your house. Even if you do not use an external hard drive, put your data onto CDs or DVDs and store the elsewhere.

I bring my backups to work and lock it in my file cabinet.

Most people just think about their hard drive crashing, they do not think about the other catastrophes in life (house fires, tornados, floods, thefts, etc.) destroying their data. If you backup is in your house and your house is lost, you backup is lost as well.

I hope and pray most of us do not run into these misfortunes, but if you are prepared it will make things a little easier for you.

So this weekend take sometime, backup your data, pictures, etc. Bring it to the office on Monday or to a family member's house (and then encourage them to backup their data and store it at your house). Trusted off-site storage is a wonderful thing.

http://www.xdrive.com/ has 5 gb free online backup storage. You can backup from anywhere and have access to any of your files from anywhere. 5gb may not hold everything, but the most important stuff can be backed up and it is nearly impossible to steal because there is nothing physical to take. There are plenty of companies out there providing this kind of service too. If you can handle the costs.

I have been using a CD-RW drive and putting the important backups in the safety deposit box. But since I just installed a new 160 Gig hard drive I got a "DVD+/-RW+/-R DVD-RAM CD-RW" Drive to reduce the number of discs required.

Oh my goodness......

I am backing up our pictures using that free XDrive wesite and it is taking forever! So far 3 hours! It says it still has 14 hours to go! It is 3.15 GB of stuff...so I guess that is a lot....

We have a Maxtor 60GB backup hard drive thing and it backs up everything and does it very fast.

I liked the idea of having the pictures stored offsite on a website in case something does happen to our home (Heaven forbid). But not if it is going to tie the computer up for a whole day!

PoSam....if you have a DVD burner you can toss them all onto a DVD and leave that at work or elsewhere....I'm not a big fan f those freebie websites, especailly with any personal data.....