Although I didn’t stop posting a few weeks ago, I didn’t have a computer. I live in thunderstorm country and we had a terrible storm that resulted in some sort of power surge that fried our computer. That gives you an explanation regarding why I haven’t had any photos on the site over the past few weeks. We had a surge protector, but apparently that doesn’t mean much because our computer was down for the count. We didn’t back anything up. This wasn’t because we’re not smart people or anything, but because my husband works two jobs and I’m managing three kids and a house. We just dropped the ball in terms of backing up all of our important computer files. We had the last four years of photos, my husband’s music collection (13,000 songs), and of course other things such as resumes and various documents. To make a long story short, a good friend of ours is a computer professional. He is the opposite of most computer guys – he’s nice, patient, and understanding. He came to our rescue by somehow surgically removing all of our files and putting them on a spare external hard drive for us. Needless to say, he saved us tremendously. My husband’s music collection not only has a bunch of rare and hard to find music, but also music he is working on or has played on. We ended up purchasing a new computer last week and while we were waiting for it to come in the mail from Apple, I had to write all my blogs at the library and post them there. We will not let this happen again. So…what type of method should we use to avoid this?

There are two methods of backing up data and media files for the average home computer user: online backup or external hard drives. I’m not even going into the cost comparison because it’s just far too complicated. External hard drives cost money ($100 on average) and these wear out. Also, I’ll just tell you up front that we decided against using one for a few reasons. First, if our house burns down or is in a tornado we are in the same boat as two weeks ago. Our files are lost. Computer equipment wears out quickly. For this reason, we decided that external hard drives are more suitable for additional storage and not the best method of emergency backup. I did a simple search and found that a 1 Terabyte external hard drive by a name brand manufacturer could be purchased for $120. That is a lot of storage, but we don’t need that much anyway.

We looked at online backup companies. Mozy.com and Carbonite.com are the leading companies providing this service. Both cost about $60 per year. The positive attributes here are that there is no equipment to buy and the backup is at a remote location. Mozy allows monthly billing of $4.95 per month. We are looking for an affordable backup that will be available if our computer is stolen, destroyed, or malfunctions. We signed up for Mozy.com. The one negative with these companies is that the process of backing up files is slow. If you have a large amount of files like we do (140 GB), it will take approximately a week or so for all the files to transfer online. I should note that this estimate is using high speed cable. If you are using satellite or DSL, it will take longer. After the initial backup process is complete, the service then can be updated daily as your files change. We just decided that in our case not only is an external hard drive sort of expensive, it is also impractical and no longer fits our needs. I should disclose that the reason we decided on Mozy.com is that a friend of ours from church uses it and likes it.

I need to note that there are a few ways of backing up photos. You don’t have to get an online backup. You could simply either print the best ones using a photo developer or you could open a special Gmail or Yahoo webmail account and send messages to your webmail address as you take the photos. Just save the best photos and title the emails by event.