Back it up: How to save your digital life for free

Keeping your data safe needn't be an expensive or difficult exercise - whether it be online or on an external hard drive.

You don't need to be a Nobel Prize winner or a rocket scientist to work out that backing up your data is an absolute no-brainer.

Not only will doing so save you endless amounts of grief in the future, but data loss is almost guaranteed as the hard drive your data is stored on is mechanical and will eventually wear out, consigning your irreplaceable digital photos, music and documents to the digital equivalent of that place where lost socks go, never to be seen again.

Whilst everyone agrees that backing up their data is a good thing, most still don't do it because; a) doing so is about as much fun as D.I.Y root canal surgery and b) it can be a costly undertaking.

Ironically, backing up data needn't be a hassle nor expensive. There are an untold number of backup options that are either dirt cheap or even free, and many are also relatively painless to use.

The reasons for backing up data may be black and white, but the pros and cons associated with the multitude of backup options available are anything but.

At the very simplest, buying a cheap external USB connected hard drive will at least move you away from being reliant on a single point of data storage failure.

Even this option however isn't seen as being attractive with many reluctant to plunk down their hard-earned cash for a backup hard drive when the benefits of doing so is such a long way off.

If splashing out on more storage isn't an option you may already have the means of keeping valuable data backed up if you have several networked PCs.

Spreading copies of vital files across the hard drives of the various networked PCs will not only decrease the chances of you losing data due to hard drive failure, but its also cost free and can be done fairly quickly with minimal fuss.

Before you start, make sure all the PCs on your home network can see each other and that you have the correct read/write access permissions set on your networked PCs.

Once this is sorted, backups can be as simple as a simple drag and drop. If privacy is an issue, archive your backup files into a password-protected ZIP file before copying it.

This option might be cheap and easy, but it does have pitfalls. While suitable for infrequent or one-off backups, the mostly manual nature of this method could quickly see it becoming a chore for monthly, weekly or daily backups.

Worse still, data is still exposed to natural disasters and/or other nasties - such as a burglar nicking your PC.

If you can live with the risks but want to automate backups, there's several metric tonnes of shareware and freeware backup utilities available through sites such as www.tucows.com that'll do the heavy lifting to take the drudgery out doing regular backups.

GFI Backup 2009 - Home Edition is a Windows backup utility that'll copy selected foldersand files to networked folders. Best of all, its freeware.

Online backup services have generally been seen as being too pricey and as such haven't got the attention they really deserve. This is a real shame, as online backups make a whole lot of sense.

They offer great up-front savings as you don't have to purchase a dedicated hard drive and more importantly, valuable data is no longer at home so if your house burns down, or your computers get stolen, you'll still have access to important documents like photos, documents and music.

Good online backup services also tend to be run out of industrial grade data centres which means there are usually multiple copies of your data scattered across several locations, all of which are carefully maintained so any data loss risks are minimised.

Adding further incentives to back up online are generous data allowances from broadband providers and increasingly competitive offers from online storage companies as well as some pretty compelling freebies.

When it comes to data centre reliability, it doesn't get much better than Microsoft's own data centres which is where Windows Live Skydrive is housed. Best of all you can get a whopping 25GB of file storage, for free. About the only real drawback is a 50MB file size limit, but given the average size of an Mp3, photo or word document, Skydrive is pretty hard to beat.

While Skydrive's 25GB wowed me, File Factory's stonking 100GB of free file storage left me floored. Offering a healthy 300MB limit per uploaded file, Filefactory.com also offer a downloadable file transfer tool.

Not only is Filefactory's sticker price (free) hard to beat, but MP3 files backed up to File Factory can also be played back using their web-based music player.

For backing up and editing documents online it's pretty hard to walk past Google Docs, especially if you're already a Gmail user.

Google Docs can handle MS Office formatted documents and whilst it can sometimes corrupt document formatting, you can store up to 5,000 documents and presentations plus a further 5,000 images.

With film photography having long gone the way of the dodo, digital photos also need to be taken into account. Once gone these often irreplaceable memories can never be bought back.

Thankfully Flickr.com gives an impressive 100MB of digital photo uploads (20MB per photo) for free per month, which is essentially unlimited storage.

Photos can also be organised and shared via online albums, and as they're now offsite and securely housed in a data centre the odds of losing any valuable memories is diminished considerably.