6 Ways to Backup And Recover Important Data

Post by The 2.0 Life contributor Squealing Rat. Find him on Twitter.

Talking to a friend about 2 weeks ago left me stunned after hearing one amazing comment. “Backup? Oh, I press the save button every once in a while.” What? NO! Are you kidding? Writing your thesis and not backing up in at least 7 different places?

Well, for all of the students out there (or anyone with stuff you’d rather not lose when your hard drive inevitably goes south), this is how you quickly and easily backup anything, and everything, everywhere.

1. First things, first. Press save. Every minute. Or every two minutes. But seriously, the best thing you can do is press save. Because that triggers the next 6 or so things I am going to suggest.

2. This point is for the people that are too lazy, forgetful or just plain engaged in their writing to press save. And if you loose your work, like I have done countless times, it is devastating. So, auto-save! Apps like Google Docs and Zoho Docs use auto-save to protect lazybones like us. I like Google Docs, but you can use Zoho Docs as well. Check out a more in-depth review of Zoho Docs here.

3. Dropbox. I use Dropbox to sync my documents with other computers and to backup my documents online. You could also use Mozy or Backblaze, which only backup and do not sync your files. Did I mention that all of these apps give you 2 GBs free? Dropbox syncs your documents with your other computers and with the server. It updates the servers when you click Save, and all the other computers when you log on.

4. Back to Google Docs for a second. In the olden days, I used a program which I loved called DocSyncer. The program is now resting in peace–*sniff*–but all good things must come to an end. Anyway, the program synced all of your documents on your PC with your Google Docs. Incredible, huh? But the point here lies in the fact that you can also use Google Docs to backup your PPTs, documents, and spreadsheets. Upload them every once in as another way of emailing them to yourself. There are a bunch of applications that do this for you– Syncplicity is a particularly good one.

5. Coming to the subject of emailing to yourself. Many people do it. It is fairly nice to have a backup of your thesis in your email. The only downside to this is that you have to manually send it to yourself. Or do you? Lifehacker has a great article on how you can set up automatic sending of important files to your email. Breathtaking!!! The only catch- you have to press save in order to trigger the email.

6. Have you ever had one of those Jerry Maguire moments where you poured your heart into an online review comment or form, only to lose it in a browser crash? And you were devastated for days. Well, I may have a solution for you. It’s called Lazarus, and it’s a Firefox add-on that saves all of your text entered online. So if you somehow crash your browser, simply recover the text using Lazarus.

So go, backup! And do let us know in the comments what other solutions you use.

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