Backups

Now I'm going to bore everyone to death by talking about backing up your data on your PC's hard drive. Almost no one does it for the simple reason that the amount of information you can store on a typical hard drive is many times the capacity of any standard media installed on a typical PC. For example, I have about 30 GB of data between photos, MP3's, and other random data files. That translates to a half dozen DVD's. Worse, without spending significant cash, the process of splitting up the files and tracking what is on what DVD and when it was last backed up is a manual process. I use the internet for some backup by, for example, storing a copy of all my digital photos on Flickr, but there really isn't a way to have a consistent, up-to-date backup in one place.

I've heard rumors of companies that sold space on their servers for you to back up local files to over the internet. But it wasn't cheap or easy. This appears to be both. The cost is less that what you would pay for media to back up to DVD's once a week (bare minimum), and the software is fully automated. I'll be digging into this a little more over the next few weeks.

But right now, I have to get to bed.