Mobile Backups
A Backup Article Contributed by Andrew Whitehead
Mobile Backups
Regular backups are critical if you use a laptop or notebook as your main computer. Because they are portable, they (and your data) are more prone to theft or breakage.
Back up to an External Hard Drive
Buy yourself an external desktop drive, preferably with a higher capacity than your laptop so you have some room to grow, and make a habit of making regular backups. Look for one with a fast connection (USB 2.0, FireWire, or both) and automated backups, many have this. Desktop hard drives are not intended to be portable so they are quite bulky. This is not a bad thing, leaving a complete system backup safe in your office or home safeguards has advantages.
An alternative approach is to backup to a secondary computer, such as an old laptop or desktop, so if your main computer is out of commission you have a second computer to get your work done. Your backup computer doesn't have to be state of the art, it only needs to be sufficient to keep you working while your main laptop is being repaired. If you don't have a second computer of any sort lying around, you could consider buying a used one as a backup. The price of a used computer compares well with that of an external hard drive.
Backup to a Portable Hard Drive
Portable hard drives are smaller, lighter, and more rugged than desktop drives. Although portable drives are very convenient for backing up large files on the road, they have some drawbacks as a complete backup solution. If you keep your back-up hard drive in your laptop bag and it gets stolen or lost, your backup has gone too, and the cost-per-Gigabyte for portable hard drives is higher than desktop models.
Making Backups While Traveling
The quickest, easiest backup plan while traveling is to copy files to a USB drive. They are physically small and will easily fit in your pocket, have capacities reaching into gigabytes, they are fast, and instantly recognized by any PC with an operating systems newer than Windows 98. If something terminal happens to your laptop, you can easily plug your USB drive into another Windows computer to continue working on your files.
If you don't have a USB drive, you could copy files to a CD if you have a CD burner. The problem here is that burning discs requires formatting time and considerable battery power.
Making Online Backups
Online backups have some serious advantages. Your files are stored off site, so a disaster in your home or office wouldn't affect them. Theft, loss or a disaster with you laptop similarly doesn't affect them. It is also comparatively inexpensive, and can be accessible to others if you wish - a convenient way of transferring large files.
It does have limitations as an only backup strategy. If you have only 500MB online storage and your laptop has a 40GB hard drive, you are only securing a small portion of your data.
