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Feature: Backing Up Before Taking Off

Just before boarding a flight home to San Francisco, my worst fears of traveling with a notebook were realized.

In an airport departure lounge, I found a vacant chair and turned on my Dell Inspiron. Instead of the familiar start-up screen, I was greeted by ominous white text on a midnight blue background. Windows would not start, and no amount of coaxing helped.

And so, with lots of work to do and no way to do it, I spent the next six hours on a plane snoozing and half-watching a bad movie. Once I was home, I called Dell tech support. The diagnosis: a failed hard drive.

Few computing scenarios are as grim as this. Luckily, I had backed up a fairly large percentage of my hard drive's contents not long before I left. Even so, since that hard-drive failure, I've strengthened my backup strategy even more. In a nutshell, my strategy is to keep multiple copies of important files in different locations.

Here are some tips and suggestions to help you avert catastrophe.

Back Up to an External Desktop Drive

Since my notebook's hard drive went supernova on me, I regularly back up its entire contents to an external desktop hard drive.

I recommend buying a desktop drive with more capacity than the one in your notebook, so you have room to grow. Shop for a model that offers easy, automated backups (most do) and a fast connection to your notebook (USB 2.0, FireWire, or both). Maxtor's 5000DV desktop hard drive, for instance, features a OneTouch button on the front that you can press to back up a partition of your notebook's hard drive. You can also configure the drive's software to back up your entire system--though it packs it into one large, compressed file. You can schedule the drive to automatically back up your data, too. And some Maxtor models use both FireWire and USB 2.0/1.1 ports on PCs and Macs.

I don't take my desktop hard drive on trips, for several reasons. Desktop hard drives tend to be bulky and aren't designed with portability in mind; for that, you need a portable hard drive (more on that in a minute). Also, I feel more comfortable leaving a complete system backup in my home office rather than taking it along.

You can use the PCWorld.com Product Finder to shop for the lowest prices on the Maxtor drive.

But Don't Rely Exclusively on a Portable Hard Drive

In addition to desktop hard drives, there is another category of external hard drives designed for portability.

Portable hard drives are smaller and lighter than desktop drives. For example, Iomega's 60GB USB 2.0 portable drive weighs 8 ounces and measures 7.5 by 3.5 by 0.7 inches. By comparison, an Iomega 80GB USB 2.0 desktop hard drive weighs 1.8 pounds and measures 7.25 by 4.5 by 1.25 inches. Portable hard drives are also designed to be more rugged than their desktop counterparts. But while portable drives are convenient, I wouldn't recommend using them as your complete backup solution.

If your notebook bag is stolen or lost, and that's where you keep your back-up hard drive, too, you'd be sunk. Also, portable hard drives are often considerably more expensive than desktop models. For instance, an Iomega 60GB USB portable hard drive retails for $380, compared to $230 for an 80GB USB desktop model. That works out to $6.33 per gigabyte for the portable drive vs. $2.87 per gigabyte for the desktop model. However, you might consider a portable hard drive for backing up large files on the road--being careful to store it separately from your notebook.

Read about portable hard drives from Iomega and SmartDisk in "Mobile Computing Tips: Portable Hard Drives."

When Traveling, Go USB

When you're away from the office, you should always back up the files you've been working on. Aside from portable hard drives, you could copy files to a CD if your notebook has a CD burner. But burning discs requires formatting time (not to mention battery power). And if the flight attendant has just announced it's time to shut off all electronic devices and you haven't yet backed up, chances are you don't have time to burn a disc.

The easiest, fastest backup plan while in transit is to copy files to a small USB drive, such as the SanDisk Cruzer. USB drives are tiny and use Secure Digital or MultiMediaCard flash memory cards for storage. They're instantly recognized by PCs with operating systems newer than Windows 98; for Windows 98 and earlier operating systems, you'll need to install a driver. If something goes wrong with your notebook, you can easily plug your USB drive into another Windows computer to access your files. Secure Digital cards or MultiMediaCards often cost more than the drives themselves, depending on their capacity, but for my money, they're the most convenient backup format on the road.

You can use our Product Finder to check the latest prices for the Cruzer (beginning around $64 for a drive with a 64MB Secure Digital card).

Get Online

I back up my most important files online. Think about it: Theft or disaster could easily rob you of your notebook as well as your external backup drive, your backup CDs--everything, in short, in your office. With online backup, your critical files are stored off site, so a disaster in your office wouldn't affect them. Also, online backup services make your files available to you from any computer with a Web browser, which could save the day if you need access to them while on the road.

I use IBackup, which automatically backs up my selected files at an appointed time and frequency (6:00 p.m. every day). Beginning at $30 a year for 50MB of backed-up data, IBackup's rates are reasonable. And you have lots of plans to choose from. I'd recommend going with the 500MB option ($108 yearly). It's the least expensive plan that offers a subaccount, which lets you post large files for others (such as colleagues or clients) to retrieve online. But don't use online services as your only backup strategy. If your notebook has a 40GB hard drive, for instance, and you're backing up only 500MB of data online, you're securing a small portion of your data.

Two's Better Than One

Many people today use a notebook as their main computer, to avoid having to buy and maintain two systems. But because notebooks are portable, they (and your data) are more vulnerable to breakage and theft.

So, in addition to religiously backing up your notebook hard drive, you should have a secondary computer--an old notebook or desktop, say--to fall back on. If your notebook is your main computer and it's knocked out of commission (as mine recently was), you'll still need a computer to get your work done.

Your secondary computer need not be fancy; my fallback is a three-year-old Dell Inspiron 3700 notebook. During my recent hard drive crisis, my old Inspiron gave me access to the Internet and my backed up files, and it enabled me to keep working while my main notebook was being repaired. If you don't have a second computer lying around, consider buying a used one for $350 or so on EBay.

The Bottom Line on Backing Up

In short, don't rely on just one backup method. I strongly suggest backing up everything on your notebook's hard drive to an external desktop drive at least once a week; backing up your most critical files online daily; copying the files you're working on when away from the office to a USB drive after every work session; and keeping a fallback computer in your office, just in case. That way you're covered under just about any circumstance.