Would you walk a high wire without a net? Even if i was brave enough to try an walk a tight rope I would insist on a net, but in the case of computing I find many people have no safety net for their data.

All it takes is one bad sector on your hard drive and your precious memories, company data, or security information are lost forever. I recently ran into a scenario where 3 years of work was being backed to a reputable USB drive that lost 50% of its capacity and put all that data at risk.

There are too many easy option out there that are affordable for you to use to not have secure data being backed up regularly. Here are a few options:

- DVD backups
- USB drives
- network storage

Any of these three are a good option and can save you a ton of heartache. A double sided DVD can record up to 9GB of data for long term storage. A USB thumb drive or a larger WD passport can get to as little as 2GB or as high as 1TB of data. They still have a fail point with no backup or redundancy in storage but they are better than nothing.

The king of the security castle is network storage. There a are a few good options I would recommend, Drobo or HP media server. In both cases these systems leverage RAID (redundant array of independent disks) which means if one of the disks fails you have protection in some cases 2 or more can fail in the case of the Drobo. These types of solutions where typically for enterprise systems but now they have dipped into the affordable realm.

Do yourself a favor and look into any of these three solution before an "uh oh" moment causes you to lose your data.

Have a great week and 4th of July!

Thanks
Abel