It’s not a question of if it will happen, but when. For me, I lost all my data about two weeks ago when my hard drive melted down. I very nearly lost it all, and had to rebuild quite a bit of data. Thankfully, I have a network of little safety devices that cover up my natural human stupidity. Here are three friendly tools within the grasp of any small business or nonprofit, which will help avert disaster:
- Mozy (http://mozy.com/). Fast and easy automatic online backup. There’s a limited free plan for individuals (great for e-mail), a cheap $5 plan for piles of space.
- Red Drive (http://www.jscape.com/reddrive/index.html). Directly access your Web files through Red Drive. It lets you bypass confusing FTP programs and let you treat an off-site storage place like any old drive.
- Any freemail account (such as Gmail or Yahoo! Mail). Automatically cc your free webmail account on any outgoing message, and you’ll have a low-tech duplicate backup.