What’s your backup plan? We recommend easy automatic online backup.

Updated September 2018:

If your hard drive crashes and you don’t have a backup of your pictures, documents, music, email, financial data, etc., data recovery services can attempt to recover your data at a cost of $500-$1000 or more. Or, for less than $6 per month – and in some cases for free – your data can be backed up automatically to a safe off-site location.

In previous articles I’ve discussed loss of personal data due to inevitable hard drive failure, computer theft or damage by fire, and methods of backup including: to CDs, flash drives and external hard drives. With normal wear-and-tear the general life span of a hard drive is approximately 5 years.

Our preferred backup method is now online automatic backup from services such as Carbonite. Online backup offers secure encrypted transfer and storage of your data (pictures, documents, music, email, etc.) that automatically backs up your important files on a daily basis.

Data recovery can cost $1000 or more. Alternatively Carbonite offers unlimited online secure storage space starting at $6/month.