Backing up your data in today’s age is absolutely imperative.  I learned that lesson the hard way about a year ago when I lost nearly 2 years worth of pictures, videos, and documents that weren’t backed up.  Luckily they weren’t company documents, or crucial information relating to business.  No monetary loss, but still — 2 years of personal data was lost because I had it stored on one external hard drive.

Hard drives can easily become corrupted and, just like that, your information could become completely unrecoverable.  There are some good options when it comes to keeping back ups of your data, though, and they are worth it to prevent a lot of stress and mourning.  It is always good to have more than one physical drive with your data on it.  Get a couple of thumb drives and portable or external hard drives and keep several copies of anything you don’t want to lose.  In addition, it is very smart to have your data backed up in the cloud.  This means that even if all of your hard drives were destroyed or corrupted (imagine a fire or other disaster), your data would be backed up on remote servers, protected by geographic redundancy in case of any failures.  This is made possible and very accessible by a company called ElephantDrive.  Elephant drive offers online backups for personal users, or companies who wish to securely store their data.  Their program encrypts your data using NSA approved, top of the line algorithms to ensure that no one will get hold of your information.  The data is stored in only the most secure data centers, and backed up to 3 locations.

ElephantDrive.com offers a free trial of their Personal and Enterprise products, as well as a “Lite” version that is always free, but offers less storage and options.  The pricing is $9.95 or $25.00 monthly for Personal and Enterprise, respectively.  Not a bad price for peace of mind, I would say.