When I used to work for Dell, I can only feel sorry for people who have lost years of their data worth 7 years on their computer due to a virus attack or someone I.T. Tech irresponsibly replaced their hard drive without informing them.

However, my company has already a secondary service available to customers world wide about getting an “Unlimited Data Backup Service” for only $5.99 / month with the possibility of you paying per year of $59.90 / year (You get 2 month free).

This way whenever you need to have “GEEK SQUAD” or anybody in that matter to help fix your computer, you can rest assure that if they take your hard drive, format it or break it… that your data is intact on a remote server with our partner’s data center.

If you are interested please send me an e-mail at support@livedrive.kitakits.com to activate your ” – free 2 week trial. – ” I just need the basics to be able to activate your account : First & Last Name / Email / Phone Number.

Nonetheless, I don’t even store my personal data locally on my laptop. My desktop is homebuilt, so I do all repairs, etc., myself, but my laptop was purchased from Best Buy. I store all my critical data on my external hard drive.

I primarily run Linux and have three distros of Ubuntu installed, plus Vista. I have nothing in Vista which would hurt me to lose, and everything that is remotely valuable or sensitive is, as I said, stored on the external. My email client is pointed to a partition on the external, which enables me to deal with my emails on most any computer I have. My music is stored there along with my videos, and all important documents are backed up there.

I don’t even need to back it all up, as it’s all on the back up. And every once in a while I back the external up to an internal SATA drive in my desktop for additional security through redundancy. For added redundancy I have a great deal of my personal files backed up to DVD-R, as well.

There is another consideration to be made in backing up your data…catastrophic hard drive failure. You don’t need to take your computer in for repair for you to lose your data. If your hard drive crashes and burns (and they do all the time, sometimes quite unexpectedly) you will lose your data as surely as if the shop replaces your hard drive.

<Usually takes me 10 hours to back uip my entire itunes
<and movie collection. Over 240 movies and 9000+ songs,
<plus 5k+ pictures, and documents. Now thats a backup job,
<and done weekly!

You know, Anthony; it sounds like you could cut down on that time significantly if you only backed up what has changed, rather than the whole kit and kaboodle. It’s unnecessary to re-back up the same files (at least, the unchanged ones) every week, and it causes unnecessary strain on both hard drives in the additional (10 hours worth!) read/write operations, resulting in decreasing the life of both hard drives.

If you could find some way to back up ONLY the files that are new or that have changed, you would save a lot of time and extend the life of your drives.