As many of you may or may not know, when I’m not moonlighting as a suave super-cool book-publisher-ninja-spy, I eek out a living as an IT nerd. Or according to my business card, a Network Consultant….

Although most of my clients are businesses I do on occasion make house calls. These house calls usually fall into one of two categories. 

There’s the:

 ”Uh, I was surfing on this totally non porn site last night and now I’m getting these weird pop-ups on my screen telling me my computer isn’t safe and I need to give them my credit card to buy an Anti-Virus program…” kind.

Or the:

“Uh, my pet rhinoceros slipped on a banana peel in my office last night and fell on my laptop…” kind. Okay maybe the rhino one doesn’t happen all that often.

In any event, the first question I ask is: “Do you have any sort of backup of your data?” Guess what the answer usually is?

People, listen to me. Computers break. They break all the time. They sit up at night and calculate when the worst possible time to crash would be… and then they do it! I have been an IT nerd for over ten years and the reason I’m still in business is because computers break. HPs, IBMs, Dells, Gateways, and yes even those precious Macs will eventually shrivel up and die.

The good news however is that these days computers are dirt cheap.  Thanks to the World Wide Web if you are a thrifty shopper you can buy yourself a whole new computer for about 200 bucks.  So, if your pet rhino does smash up your hard drive, no biggie, that can be replaced for less than fifty bucks.

HOWEVER, that thesis you’ve been working on for last six months, those pictures of your grandchild’s first birthday party, those scanned documents outlining the government’s plot to assassinate JFK… those are now gone.  Like forever gone… unless… YOU HAVE A BACKUP! 

So now that I’ve gotten the lecturing off my chest, here are 3 quick and easy things you can do to avoid disaster in the future:

• Windows XP, Vista, and 7 all have a nifty built in program called, oddly enough, Backup.  Use this program to backup all of your stuff to an external hard drive.  Why an external hard drive?  Because it’s “external” to your PC.  The theory being that it’s unlikely that both devices will crap out at the same time.   Unless of course your house gets hit by a meteor… but then you have bigger problems.   External hard drives can be bought just about anywhere they sell electronics and can be found for under 100 bucks.

• Back your data up online.  Now a days there are tons of companies out there that will for a fee backup your data and store it at their facility.  This is done via your internet connection.   Check out: http://mozy.com/  or http://www.idrive.com/ for a couple of examples.  The nice thing about backing your data up online is that your data is now stored at a separate location.  So in the event that something catastrophic does happen at your home (see meteor) your data should be safely resting at a quiet climate controlled facility for you to retrieve… once the fire department puts your house out.

• Backup your data to CD or DVD.  While a bit cumbersome by today’s standards, the tried and true method of copying data to a CD or DVD is still a perfectly acceptable means of storing your info that you’d rather not lose.  In some cases, say like for storing photos or documents, it is even preferred as there are no moving parts on said CD/DVD to break.  Thus for long term data storage, backing info up on those round coasters is a great idea.  Again, Windows XP, Vista, and 7 and Mac OSX all have the capability to copy info to a CD-RW or DVD-RW.  If for some reason your PC/Mac does not have a CD or DVD burner in it you can probably buy one online for 15 bucks.

So I hope I’ve given you a couple of ideas on ways you can save yourself from a real headache when the inevitable computer crash comes around. Don’t be a slacker. If you’re not backing things up regularly… get on it. Remember, it’s not “if”… it’s “when”.