My second post

Now, I'm on a roll.

Tricia mentioned that we recently lost many of our pictures due to a hard drive failure.

While frustrating, it is a minor thing to deal with. The most frustrating part is how easy it would have been to avoid. We have now done two things to help protect our data - and would highly, highly recommend others to do so as well.

First - back up your data online. We are using mozy.com. It is $5/month and has unlimited backup. This is a great way to save all precious data online. There are other services as well that I am sure all work perfectly fine (I chose mozy after recommendations from some more techie friends than I). $5/month is well worth backing up your picture memories, emails, music, or other important documents.

If you have not clicked on the link yet - DO IT NOW.

Second - we bought a HP MediaSmart Server. For those who are more technical, it is a type of NAS - or "Network Attached Storage". It allows us to automatically backup the files on our PC to another device in our house. It is very easy to set up. It also uses a variant of RAID. In plain-speak - when you put data on it, it saves it on two different hard drives. So if one breaks, the other drive still has the data. Cool,huh? It also allows for other features, like sharing files between PCs, and we're finding it very helpful in our multi-PC environment. But it is very expensive, particularly when compared with mozy.

So, go now and subscribe to mozy and get your data backed up. It takes 15 minutes to download and setup. It then runs on its own and you don't have to worry about it - unless something happens to your PC - then you can just log in and retrieve your data.

Seriously, go sign up now. You will thank me later.