Making sure you back up your data is one of those really important, but not so urgent type of things that we hear about in self-help books! Unfortunately, since many of us have tons of personal, work-related, and business data on our computers, it is EXTREMELY important to back up your data!!

Here’s a short guide that I’ll update later which will help you get started if you’re one of those people who has no idea on how to go about backing things up!

First thing to understand is that you can essentially back up two types of items: either the operating system and its associated files OR your data which is usually separately stored on another drive or in your My Documents or Desktop. First we’re going to talk about backing up your data because that’s usually more important than the OS. We’ll talk about the operating system in another post!

However you back up your data, make sure it’s not on the computer! As silly as that may sound, I have seen many people who have simply copied their data to other folders or onto another partition (like D:). This will not help, so don’t do it! Here’s the media you want to use:

1. CD’s/DVD’s - This is the easiest and is usually fine for most people with newer computers. If you can burn DVD’s, then unless you have tons of songs or videos, you should probably be able to fit your data onto 1 or 2 discs. Use your favorite burning software and you’re done!

2. External HD’s/Zip Drives - I find this to be the best way to store my data because external hard drives are fairly cheap and you can get a large amount of space for a good price. Simply plug in your USB or Firewire drive and copy the data onto the new drive. What’s even nicer is that with an external drive, you can configure a backup using Windows to start automatically and as long as your drive stays connected (this applies to desktops that are sitting at home), you won’t have to manually do anything!!! And that’s really why people don’t backup their data, it’s usually not because people don’t know, but no one ever gets around to it! So schedule a backup and you’ll never have to worry about it again! I’ll explain step by step how to setup a backup in Windows later.

3. Online file storage - This is quickly becoming the next best place to store your files because it’s requires no extra hardware, it’s conveniently accessible, and it’s pretty cheap! If you don’t want to buy anything or can’t figure out how to connect something to your computer, then try this option! Simply create an account and there will be a button called Upload, click that and choose your files!

http://www.box.net/

This site has 1GB of free storage and it’s only .99 a month for 5GB!!! That’s a lot of space!!!

AOL also has an online storage service called X-Drive and they have 5GB of storage for free!! Of course the only thing that is required for online storage is a broadband internet connection otherwise it’ll take forever to upload your data.

http://www.xdrive.com/

Update: Here’s a great post from lifehack.org that lists 90 online storage services you can use to upload your computer’s data.