After a really catastrophic and expensive experience when my old laptop recently died on me and I was stuck sans-pc in the middle of two big projects for a week and a half, I’m now deadly serious about making daily backups. A hard-drive crash, complete system fail or theft is inevitable, guaranteed, and ask anyone else who has experienced this, it WILL happen at the worst possible moment. So be prepared. Don’t be a nincompoop like I was.

I recently purchased the MAXTOR OneTouch II which quietly does scheduled daily backups for me. It can be customized to backup all the computers on your network, making either duplicate copies of all your files, or offering a comprehensive backup where you can restore your files from various restore points.

But what about hardware theft or fire? Making off-site backups is more time-consuming but probably even more important.

Mozy.com offers 2GB of free space with automatic encrypted backups to their server. For just under $5 a month you get 30GB. Mozy has received praise from bloggers all over the world, and was PC Magazines Editor’s Choice just a few months ago.

“How safe are my files?” you may ask… When you use Mozy, your files are encrypted on your PC using 448-bit Blowfish encryption and then transferred to the Mozy servers using 128-bit Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption. You have the option of using a Mozy key, or your own private key to encrypt your data.

I’m signing up for my free account today.