Except for security, backing up is probably the most important aspect of computing, and yet so overlooked.  Ask yourself, if your computer was taken from you how would you cope. What would you lose that you could not replace. If you haven’t backed up all those photos they would be lost. Just give it a thought. Even your email addresses would be gone.  All your favourites or bookmarks, everything in your documents etc etc. there are many ways to backup. You can backup to an external hard drive which can be programmed to do this daily and automatically. 

How often to back up. Ask yourself how much info do I want to redo. I mean if you work on your computer a lot then you probably want to back up daily. If you take photos from your camera into the computer you should back them up before you delete them from your camera.  If you don’t use your computer for work or business then you can probably back up every two weeks. For business, everyday.

According to the amount of data you have you could backup onto a flash drive, they come now up to 64 gigabytes, (that is quite a lot of data),  you can back up onto dvd’s and cds, a dvd holds 4.2 gigabytes, a cd has 720 megabytes. Discs though have a life span depending on how you well keep them. Heat, cold, direct sun are detrimental to discs so keeping discs in the car in the summer can take its toll.

Now with all these methods you must be aware that the most important thing is that the backup itself must be away from the computer

Even if you have your back up on an external hard drive and someone enters the house they will probably take the external drive as well as the computer as this is also resalable.  And if the house were to burn down then all backup devices in the house will be lost. One good way is to keep a backup in the garage or with a friend.
Now there is a way to backup that remedies this problem and that is cloud computing. You can backup to the cloud. It is outside the house so no one can access it or steal it. Cloud computing is encrypted.  Microsoft is offering 25 gigabytes of free storage on the cloud. It is called Sky Drive. All you have to do is sign up for it and then upload your data. With 25 gigs you might get up all of your My Documents and My Pictures.  It is sure worth the effort to upload. Have found the only negative is it takes long to upload but you could just leave it overnight as I did and eventually it gets up there.  Remember you only have to upload the data once. Google sky drive, then sign up with user name and password.

Dropbox  When dropbox came along it was a godsend!

This is also cloud storage but with a lot more.
If you go to Dropbox and create a account with username and password, download dropbox into your computer. it will create a folder in your area on the cloud and the same identical folder in your documents called-  my dropbox. If you can imagine now anything you put into this folder is immediately uploaded to the cloud folder.

So they are identical and it happens automatically. Incredible. This means no matter where you are if you want to access your data just go to dropbox put in your username and password and you will be in your drop box folder on the cloud able to access whatever files or photos you have put up there. I you travel to England you will have access to your photos and documents.  If you have two computers you can put the same drop box account on both of them and the folders will update automatically.

Now it is even better. You can create other folders in your drop box original folder.  If you want to share a folder with a friend or family you invite them to share the folder when they accept, a copy of the folder you invited them to share will appear in there drop box folder. Now anything you or they put into this folder will automatically be in both folders and accessible by both of you.

Of course they too would have downloaded drop box and created their account.

We used this extensively with our clubs
It is also fantastic to share photos this way.

 

GMAIL

Mar 1, 2011 7:43 AM
Gmail is hard at work restoring service to about 40,000 Gmail users after a software bug deleted their e-mail messages, folders, labels, and filters. So, while things are looking good for those users affected by the bug, this episode proves, once again, that while Web-based services may be robust, you still have to take responsibility for your own data.

Google also takes responsibility. Ben Treynor, Google's VP Engineering and Site Reliability Czar, said on Google's Gmail blog that Google backs up all Gmail to tape. "Since the tapes are offline, they're protected from such software bugs," he blogged. "But restoring data from them also takes longer than transferring your requests to another data center, which is why it's taken us hours to get the e-mail back instead of milliseconds."
Treynor said a storage software update introduced the unexpected bug, which caused 0.02 percent of Gmail users to temporarily lose access to their e-mail.

It's Not Just Google Services You Need to Worry About
However, it's not just Gmail and other Webmail services that are the problem; we're increasingly using cloud-based tools for work and communication--sites and services such as Twitter, Facebook, Google Docs, Microsoft Office Live, Tumblr, Wordpress, Blogger, Posterous, Flickr, Picasa, and on and on.

But that doesn't mean you should forego a solid back-up plan for all your online data. If the worst ever does happen, and a free Web service dumps your stuff permanently, the only response you can reasonably expect from these companies is "Oops, sorry."

With that in mind, here are a few suggestions on how to add an extra layer of security in case the cloud lets you down one day.

Gmail and Friends
The easiest way to create a local backup of your e-mail is to use a basic POP3/IMAP e-mail client such as Mozilla Thunderbird, Apple's Mail app, or Windows Live Mail. If you don't like using an e-mail client for daily use and prefer to use the Web interface instead, just fire up your desktop program on a regular schedule. Even if you launch your desktop client once a month, you will at least have the bulk of your mail stored offline.

Facebook
Facebook recently launched a feature that lets you export almost all of your Facebook data into a handy ZIP file. All you have to do is visit Facebook's export tool and click the download button. Then you'll get an e-mail when your file is ready to download to your desktop. This is an ideal task to do once a month or even once every season. You don't want to lose all those mobile uploads should the worst happen, and this makes it much easier to move your data around should you wish to leave Facebook one day.