These days your life is on your computer. Surviving a computer disaster is important. You might think that your USB-connected hard drives are a safe back up for all the important files that you have on your computer. Or you could be under the impression taking backup on a CD is 100% safe. The fact is that CDs, USB hard disks and your computer hard disk will fail some day. But there could be files on your computer that you need forever. For example your family photos, financials documents, PDF files, important email communication etc.

So for the most critical information it is better to do a CD back up and a USB portable disk back up. But even this is not absolutely safe. According to research one in 14 drives older than two years failed during any given year. Every year, 43% of the computer users lose emails, documents, photos and other files. Remember that external hard drives are mechanical devices and you should not expect them to last decades. CD’s fail all the time with risk of scratches, strong heat, light and misuse destroying their storage capabilities. In perfect conditions a CD RW is supposed to last around 25 years but that is also no guarantee. So no backup system is 100% perfect. To overcome this if you are really serious and worried about your data getting lost then consider online backup of your critical documents. An online company called Carbonite provides this online backup service. The service is completely automatic. Carbonite installs a small application on your computer and works by itself in the background taking remote back up of new and changed files that need to be backed up. The software is integrated into your systems operating system, so there’s nothing for you to do. You just set it up once and it works on its own. You can get back your files whenever you want with a few clicks. Carbonite charges for this service, it is not free. But if you think the data on your PC is important and is of a frequently changing nature then you might well think of a service like this. Checkout Carbonite

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