If you recall, last week we determined that floppy disks were the worst solution for backing up your data. While we mainly talked about physical hard drive failure, we should bear in mind that viral attack, accidental deletion and user-initiated catastrophe (dad or the teenagers playing around with things) can all result in significant data loss. While any tech worth his or her salt should be able to recover data in these situations, it all costs money and downtime; having a current back-up is a much better idea.

How you back-up and what medium you use is a matter of personal taste. These days most people use an external hard drive or a USB flash drive, mainly because they are cheap, reliable and above all, easy to use. Some still prefer CDs or DVDs, which is fine, but generally they tend to be cumbersome and complicated to use. Another point to remember is that no back-up solution is bulletproof. For example, CD and DVD media are well-known for physically breaking down over time, much in the same way your car rusts away quietly in the garage. Some of the disks I burned 10 years ago now look dodgy and don't read properly. Industry pundits reckon around five years is the average shelf-life of CD/DVD media, but if you used budget disks then their viable lifespan may be considerably shorter. My thoughts are if you choose to use CD/DVD media to archive data, make more than one copy and re-burn the disks every couple of years to be on the safe side.

One could argue that flash drives and external hard drives will also fail. While this is true, they tend to be more resilient over time than other types of media. The reality is that no hardware is going to be 100 per cent reliable, which is why you should have multiple copies of anything you really don't want to lose.

`What about those online storage and back-up sites I see advertised?' I hear you ask. That's a good question. Having stuff stored off-site is a great idea; if your house burns down, your back-ups don't go up in smoke with it. Of course, you can always store your external hard drives, flash drives or copies of DVDs at another location as well (and I would recommend doing so) which achieves the same purpose. The main issue with online storage is that you have to upload your data, and with New Zealand's pathetic and expensive broadband it would take days (or weeks) to upload even moderate amounts.

Aside from the time factor, data corruption could make the process frustrating and render back-ups unreliable. On top of that, you normally pay a monthly fee for the service, (not to mention extra bandwidth), and my feeling is that this money could be better spent on a reliable local back-up solution. So what do I do? I use a combination of archiving and backing up. For the purposes of these articles, I refer to archiving as the transferring of data you don't often use to large format storage (a series of DVDs or external hard drive for example) and storing them either off site or somewhere like a fire- safe. Backing up is copying often-used data to an internal hard drive or a suitably- sized flash drive for handy access and modification. Stuff such as old photos, documents and other data you don't usually use can be archived and stored somewhere safe. If you ever need it (to bore friends and acquaintances for example) you can take it out, use it and return it to storage. This also frees up space on your computer so you can accumulate even more stuff.

For archiving, I recommend an external hard drive for sheer ease of use. Data you use on a daily basis can be backed up to a hard drive or a flash drive. I run a custom-made script to copy critical files to both my second internal hard drive and my flash drive, which I carry around with me. The whole process takes one mouse click, and in less than a minute I have three copies, more than enough should my computer fail. Once a month I update my stored archives with any changed or added files. This covers me for just about any eventuality.

In the final installment, I will discuss options like back-up software, password protected archives and other goodies. Until then, back-up what you can.