Sometimes I take for granted some of the lessons I’ve learned about computers over the years. I should be sharing these stories with you so that perhaps you don’t have to learn those lessons the hard way as I did.

Several years ago, before I made the big switch to Macintosh, I had a hard drive fail on me, and I didn’t have a back up. This was not a good thing. This can happen at anytime and to anyone. There were a couple of reasons I didn’t have a back up:

1. Hard Drives were expensive. Standard drives were only about 20 gigabytes at the time but they cost a couple hundred dollars, and as a poor college student I didn’t have that. Now you can get a 160 gig drive for about $60.

2. I had never had any other major hardware fail. The fact that hardware fails sometimes was never in the forefront of my mind.

When my hard drive died I lost a lot of valuable stuff. My entire portfolio was gone. As a designer that’s how I get jobs without it I’m lost. I did have a few files on cd and some jpeg versions of some of the files but all the originals were gone. This has all become painfully relevant again as I spent a couple hours today working on a friends computer and it turned out that his hard drive is dead. He didn’t have a backup. It’s a very sad situation. I don’t want anyone else to go through the same thing, hence this post.

You might ask why you need a backup or is it worth the financial investment. The question you should be asking is can you live if you lose those pictures of last summers vacation? What if all your financial data is gone tomorrow? How about your lovingly groomed digital musical library? If I lost any one of those things it would be the like the end of the world.

Setting up a backup strategy is really easy. It would be easy for me to talk about a Mac only strategy because that is what I’m most familiar with but I’ll just discuss the strategy in general at this time.

There a couple different ways to backup your data let’s start with the most important.

1. A duplicate of all your documents, pictures, and music. This is simple and easy and can be done on cd’s or dvd’s if you have a burner. I recommend using an external usb hard drive as it is faster and can be expanded over time. There are backup programs that you can get that can automate this process but all you need to do is once a week copy all of your important files onto your backup device. Pretty simple.

2. Bootable clone. This is the second most important backup strategy you could implement. This involves making an exact copy of your entire hard drive so that if your primary drive crashes you can just swap it out wit the cloned drive and you’re up and running in just a little while. This does require an external hard drive as you’ll need something equal to or greater in size as you primary hard drive. Backup software can usually automate this process for you as well.

3. Incremental Backup. This is the least important way of backing up your data but can be very convenient. This is a fully automated backup that happens at a specified interval (hourly, daily) in which a backup application makes an initial copy of all the data and then just updates the info that has been changed recently. This way you always have a backup of your most recent data. This is what “Time Machine” in Mac OS 10.5 does.

Now this is just a basic overview of implementing a backup strategy for your data but is not an exhaustive discussion on the subject. If you have any questions leave them in the comments of feel free to send me an email.

I am very blessed and have nothing to complain about but I like to anyway. I pre-ordered an ipod touch and am so excited about finally being able to take my music, videos, pictures and the web with me in my pocket. It seems too good to be true. It’s just like the iPhone only without the 2 year contract and having to deal with at&t.

Then I realize that the mail application from the iphone is not included on the ipod touch. That just sucks. I’m sure apple just doesn’t want this product cannibalizing sales from the iPhone but come on I use mail more than any other application on my mac.

The perfect device would be an open iphone that didn’t require being stuck to a service provider. If you only wanted to use the wifi then that’s ok. Then you would have a phone, camera, email, great web browser, music, photos, videos, youtube. But we don’t have that so we either deal with at&t or…

We get the new ipod touch and live with the limitations of not being able to take pictures or send email. I’ve read that the ipod touch has the same hardware and operating system of the iphone so hypothetically you could take applications from the iphone and install them on the ipod touch (not that I am knowledgeable to do that). I’m sure people are working on that as we speak and as soon as the ipod touch starts showing up in peoples hands (sept 28) we will see it happen.

There may be relief in site for the mail less ipod touch but you still can’t take pictures and email them to a friend. Oh well…. I doubt I’d use that as much as it seems but it would be cool for mobloging.

All that said, I’m so very excited for my ipod touch it is the best ipod ever and capable of doing so many things very well. I am lucky just to have one pre-ordered, but not as lucky as I will be when I have it in my hot little hand.

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