Blessed are the Paranoid, for They Shall Have Backups

I learned that phrase back in the day when hard drives were considered huge at 20MG, and most of us who weren't very rich were still using floppies. (Remember floppies?! Except the ones Macintosh used that were 3.5 inches weren't floppy since they had a rigid shell around them.)

Anyway, I haven't mentioned DropBox or other backup systems on this blog recently -- so I'm due for a shout-out. Below is an excellent link to an "unofficial guide" to DropBox. You can read online, or download in pdf or epub formats. It's a good walk-through for someone who has no idea what DropBox and similar online resources are:

http://www.makeuseof.com/pages/download-using-the-magic-pocket-a-dropbox-guide

Why consider something like this? Because if your hard drive crashes with your only copy of everything on it, you are going to be one unhappy camper. 

However, if you have copies of everything "in the cloud," at a remote location online, you will simply shrug and smile. Your crash will be about as painful as a papercut. You'll still have to get a new hard drive, or make do until you can get a new one. But all your data will be safe.

The best part: DropBox (and other services) run seamlessly, with no need to remember to do much of anything after you install the parts. I save everything that is an active file to DropBox. (The archived stuff is elsewhere, but still safe.)