May 8, 2008

Have a bet each way and back up your precious files online, urges Adam Turner.

Stop and think about all the important stuff that’s on your computer. Family photos, school assignments, tax records and other irreplaceable documents. Now imagine they are all gone. Forever. Disasters don’t just happen to other people.

Twenty years from now there will be plenty of kids with no baby photos at their 21st birthday parties because their parents didn’t back up. Hard drives die, computers get stolen and houses burn down. The only way to completely protect precious data is to use some form of offsite back-up.

Sure, you can regularly burn files to a DVD or external drive and leave it at a friend’s house, but how often will you remember to do it? The best back-up systems are those that run automatically online.

Several large, consumer-focused online back-up services have sprung up in recent years, so there’s plenty of competition and you shouldn’t be …

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