Some people are nuts about backing up their data. I mean, these people are really over the top obsessive about protecting their family photos and iTunes music that the anxiety of losing it is apparent in their shifty eyes and sweaty arm pits.  You smell their fear. It’s surrounds them like a dark mist. And if you’re really quiet, you can open your windows in the middle of the night and hear them whimpering in their tortured dreams as they fend off imaginary, zombie hard drives that simply will not boot.

I, on the other hand, don’t sweat it because when it comes to data backup, I take the carpet bombing approach–the “shock and awe” approach to securing my data. So if you want to learn how to backup your computer like a real man, read on. Otherwise, I’ll see you in hell.

The first thing you want to do is have a plan. No one ever won a war without a plan (we’ll just leave George W out of this). The plan should be something like the following: “I’m going to put all my stuff in one place instead of having it scattered all over my PC. I will then back it up.”

I know it’s not an elaborate plan, but it’s a start. Putting all of your photos, music and documents in your My Documents folder, for example, makes it easy because you only really need to worry about backing that up. Once you data is all in one spot, you can let the carpet bombing begin.

Backup to an external hard drive AND to a second internal hard drive. The external hard drive allows you to get that data out of the house. Take the drive to work or leave it at your parents house. You can schedule the other internal hard drive to backup your data using the built-in backup utility in Windows. Copying your data to CDs and DVDs are no good because they’re just plain stupid and shiny. I hate shiny things.

Backup to Gmail or Yahoo Mail. Sites like those are great for keeping large amounts of data off site. Email yourself important documents and photos. Most of these services give you over 5 Gigs of space for free. Flickr is a also a great place to store photos and a great way to share them with family and friends so they can access and download them to their PC for yet-another off site backup.

Lastly, use a backup service like Carbonite. It’s not free, but it will monitor your computer for changed files and automatically back them up. Simply setup “watch folders” and Carbonite will monitor them. Whatever new photos, documents or music you put into these watch folders will immediately get backed up by Carbonite.

So you no longer need to fear disaster, zombies or asteroids. Well, maybe asteroids. But as long as you have a backup scheme in place and spread your data around to multiple locations, your data will be safe from everything else.