It’s one of the lesser-known holidays, but yes, today is officially World Backup Day.

 

And as a girl who recently lost about 6 months’ worth of business files due to a dropped external hard drive, which of course happened to drop in exactly the perfect (or, uh, not-so-perfect?) way that caused what they call “platter damage,” which, the data recovery guys told me when I rushed them said hard drive, ready to drop whatever thousands of dollars were necessary to recover the lost data, is unrecoverable, I am now a huge proponent of off-site backup.

 

Anyway, I found I was remarkably calm for a girl who had just lost her last 6 month’s worth of work (and thanks to modern technology and some sheer luck I was actually able to recover a decent amount of those files, from sources other than my “it’s now a coaster” hard drive).

 

There are lots of backup systems out there, ranging from systems like Time Machine (for Mac) that you set up yourself with an external hard drive on site to ones that are completely in the cloud. Having now been through TWO data losses (yes, I’m a slower learner), I now use both Time Machine and a really great cloud backup I just discovered called Crash Plan. It allows you to back up an unlimited amount of data to its cloud servers, backup to a friend or family member’s computer as well, and you can set the time of day that it backs up so it’s not bogging down your network. And it’s really reasonably priced! (I paid $189.99 for FOUR YEARS of unlimited backup!) Oh, and I’ve also found their customer service super helpful and responsive — they helped me navigate setting up my backup through my NAS as well as troubleshooting it when it was unable to connect and couldn’t back up for a few days. I can’t say enough good things about them!

 

And in honor of World Backup Day, Crash Plan is offering a special deal. So what better time to make sure you’re covered?

 

Happy backing up, and may you never need to actually retrieve those files!