Time and time again, we come across poor soles that have lost data because their hard drive has failed. Invariably, much of their data has not been backed up and the result is catastrophic. You can rewrite term papers and reinstall applications, but when you lose photos of your wedding or the movie of your child’s first steps, it’s truly painful. We’re writing this guide to help people backup in a way that is virtually full-proof. These three backup methods will help ensure your data never gets lost again.

Step 1: Automatic Offsite Backups

The key to success of keeping your data safe is having a program do it for you by backing up to an off-site location. We recommend Carbonite for this job. Carbonite is an affordable way to get unlimited backup capabilities. It works by monitoring the folders and files you specify. When something changes in that folder, it backs it up to their online server. If you ever switch computers, or if your drive fails, you can always get your data back. Try Carbonite now.

Step 2: Manually Backup to a Second Hard Drive

The second step is to backup to a secondary hard drive. This can be an Internal hard drive or an external hard drive. You can get 1TB drive relatively cheap and this will be enough storage to backup to for a long time. Now keep in mind, this is still temporary storage. If you do not have two sources for your backup, then the data is not really backed up. This backup method should be done weekly. Just drag and drop your Documents and Settings folder over to it each time. Find Computer Hard Drives here.

Step 3: Backup Your Backup

Along with your first large hard drive, you really need to have a second large hard drive to backup your backup. It might seem like overkill, but think of it this way: You have an 80Gb hard drive in your PC and you’re constantly backing up and moving data to your larger 1TB drive. Eventually, you will have more data on the second drive than you do on the first. So that extra data is not backed up, even though it is on the backup drive. The second hard drive needs to be external, so you can plug it in once a month and backup your secondary drive. You should pick a day to do this and stick with it. For instance, leave the second backup drive at a relative’s house or at work and bring it home on the first of every month.

While the first step in this process will likely be enough, you can never rely on one single system to backup your important data. So find an online solution, by a secondary hard drive for home and backup to that weekly, and finally, buy a large third drive that you can physically bring home once a month to backup your backup drive.

For questions about backing up, be sure to visit our forums today!