Data Backup Software and Service

Most of people cannot live without computer. Your computer, apart from being a machine that has made life so much easier and lets you do almost everything you can imagine, is also a big box containing lots and lots of one thing - data. Computer is the bed for data. Just be nice with it to keep your data there or it will make your life or work into disasters.

For the most part, this data is safe until your computer crashes. If you haven't backed up, your data is gone! This situation is so common that the art of the 'backup' has spawned an entire industry. Today there are dozens of firms offering different data backup solutions.

There are 4 important data back up strategies for Windows users, most of them being almost the same for Mac users except for the change in the software type. Check them out and start backing up.

Back up Offline Files on your computer
Offline files and folders are stored on your computer; you know the files that are available to you when you're no online. Use an external storage device to back up them. Such drives are plug and play and very easy to use. Another smart way is to back them up online, such as Google Documents. You may upload your files there as a backup.

You may also choose back up software, there are many. There is a free tool called AceBackup for this purpose. There's one more tool which I came across known as IdleBackup. It's an excellent tool which is free and automatically backs up files while you're away from your computer. LifeHacker has a detailed description about the entire process and how it works.

Back Up Browser Preferences
Your browser is your gateway to the internet. It stores data which includes your bookmarks and passwords and many other customized settings which should be backed up. If you are using Internet Explorer then you can export your bookmarks and save them to the external drive. Regarding the passwords, there are some paid tools to export and store IE passwords.

For Firefox users, there is much more data, like the extensions and preferences. Fortunately, the backup is not that tough. Check out this post - 3 Useful Methods to Back Up Your Firefox Preferences. My personal favorite is the FEBE extension which backs up everything with a single click. I used to restore all my Firefox preferences easily, after reinstalling Windows.

Back Up Emails
Now emails are as important as any other data and they need to be backed up. If you are using any web based email account, a separate Gmail account can function as an online email backup center for those accounts. You can go ahead and set up the Gmail mail fetcher for the purpose.

If you are using desktop email app like Outlook, you can export and backup the emails using the Import and Export Wizard. You could even export and backup emails from Outlook to Gmail online.

Sync Tools
We have discussed how to backup your data, however if you don't organize and sync the data in your computer and the external storage device then that's work half done. You need to setup tools which would also sync the data between the devices. IdleBackup, which I've mentioned above does incremental back ups which means it only backs up those files which have changed. So in a way it takes care of the sync task.

Other good tools which let you sync data between two locations are SyncbackSE and the free tool, Microsoft SyncToy. SyncbackSE comes with a free trial and is probably the best backup and sync tool available. It also offers a free version called Syncback Freeware which is a pretty awesome tool too.

Hope you like the backup strategies mentioned and make use of them to back up your data everyday.