See that? That’s the stack of dead hard drives I found when cleaning out my office closet. They’re all from within the last 7 years.

You hear this all the time, but it still seems to never sink in: back up your data. Most people are, in some fashion, very dependent on the data in their computers, yet less than 10% regularly back it up. Not backing up your data is like not wearing a seat belt — sure, you probably won’t get in an accident, but do you really want to take that chance when prevention is so easy?

My stack of dead drives looks extreme to most people, but I have always had a lot of data, so I’ve owned a lot of hard drives. As such, this has given me more than enough opportunities to be exposed to the pain of data loss. Fortunately, I only actually lost important files one time. How can you protect yourself?

Most people don’t back up regularly because it’s too inconvenient or time consuming. I’m going to offer some recommendations that aim to cut down those barriers so that backing up can be easy for everyone. We’ll start with the cheapest and work our way up.

The manual way

OK, so this method isn’t really all that convenient, but we had to start somewhere so you can see how much better the other methods are. The manual method is exactly what it sounds like — you manually copy files from your drive to another piece of media. In the “old days,” this often meant a burnable CD or DVD, but since external hard drives are so dang cheap (500GB for under $80 if you look), not to mention a heck of a lot faster, I’d just go with one of those. But you’ve got to make yourself do it regularly, and always manually picking out what you want to save is slow going.

PROS: Simple, inexpensive.
CONS: Time consuming, slow.

The scheduled way

Basically we’re taking the same principles from the manual method — copy a set of files to different media — but taking a “set it and forget it” approach so you don’t have to think about it. You really should at least adopt this method. You’ll need an external hard drive again, and a piece of software to make the magic happen. I can’t speak to the Windows side, but on Mac OS X, there’s a couple different ways to do this.

OS X 10.5 has the built-in Time Machine feature, which can utilize an external drive to make hourly backups of your files. It uses a smart algorithm each hour to only back up the files that have been changed, and then provides a slick interface for you to “go back in time” to retrieve a file from any point in the timeline that it still maintains on the drive (depending on the size of the drive, it will start deleting the oldest stuff at some point). This will work for restoring your files after a catastrophic drive crash, and is also great for people who might be afraid of screwing up a file and wanting to go back to an older version at any time.

The other way is to do a full drive image. While Time Machine (and other targeted backup software) will only back up your personal files, a full drive image is a snapshot of your entire hard drive — the operating system, the applications, the boot sector, everything. If your main drive dies, you simply re-image it with the backup and you’re ready to boot back up in a matter of minutes. With the selective copy method (like Time Machine), you would have to reinstall the operating system first. I personally use a great piece of software called SuperDuper to do a full drive image of my main computer every night at 3:00 am. This doesn’t store multiple copies of every file, like Time Machine does; I can’t go back to an older version other than what was most recently backed up, but that’s not a concern for me. It does a smart delta backup (only copying things that have changed) and allows for excluding folders that you don’t care about (my Downloads folder, for example). SuperDuper is a bargain at just $28.

PROS: Automatic; full-drive images can speed up system recovery time
CONS: Might have to spend a bit for software

The totally transparent way

What if you could just always keep your files on something that (statistically) was nearly failure-proof? Old hats would say “use a RAID 5 array,” but getting your hand crushed in a car door is generally a lot more fun than setting up and maintaining a RAID array, so allow me to introduce you to the 21st century backup solution for the masses: the Drobo.

The Drobo is a box that you stick four hard drives into and then attach to your computer via USB or FireWire. Your computer sees it as one big hard drive; the Drobo is performing some RAID-like magic (but better) and turns those four drives into one huge redundant array of disks, without any configuration or hoop-jumping on your part. Any one of the drives can fail, and none of your data is lost. Should a drive fail, the light next to it on the front of the Drobo will turn red, and you just order a new one and pop it in — the Drobo will automatically rebuild the redundancy system, and you don’t have to do a thing. Unlike RAID, the drives don’t even have to be the same size — any four drives will do, and when you’re ready to upgrade you can do it one at a time — just pop one out and slide the new one in, growing your storage one drive at a time. It couldn’t possibly be any easier.

I personally don’t have one (yet), but I’ve heard enough talk about them and seen one in action to know that this is the ultimate low-maintenance data backup system you can possibly buy. I do plan on picking one up at some point. The downside? Cost. The Drobo itself is around $500, plus the four drives. If you don’t need FireWire, you can find the first-gen Drobo (USB only) for around $350; that’s the one I plan on getting. Then you grab, say, four 750GB drives for $90 each (current price at NewEgg), plug it into your computer, and keep your files on it. Now you’ve got a 2.0 TB totally redundant storage system. I plan on sharing out the Drobo on my network and having all my machines back up to it.

PROS: Totally transparent, easy to upgrade
CONS: Relatively expensive

I hope you all back up your data! If you want to be really safe, of course, you should move your backups to a different physical location (in case of a flood/fire). But just getting into one of the basic backup methods above and save you a lot of heartache when you eventually lose a hard drive — and I can almost guarantee you that at some point, you will.

Have any other backup tips or software recommendations? Post in the comments.