Back up your data

Most of you have heard about the hack where the Apple and Amazon cloud services and people lost their data.  The attack wasn't technical, it was "social engineering" - phoning up the services and convincing tech support that you needed your account info ungraded.  Of course, the new infor allowed the attacker to get in to the accounts, and locked the legitimate user out.

Quite frankly, there's nothing that you can do to prevent this.  But this was the part of the article that should never happen to anyone:

Had I been regularly backing up the data on my MacBook, I wouldn’t have had to worry about losing more than a year’s worth of photos, covering the entire lifespan of my daughter, or documents and e-mails that I had stored in no other location.

Backups address rather a lot of security problems, and everyone should be doing them.  You should really back up to multiple different locations, so if you lose your account or machine, and you lose a backup, you're still covered.

I like this sort of thing for quick backups, and there's a deal going on right now*:

32 GB flash drive - you can back up a lot of data onto that.  $20.  FOr that price, you can get a couple, and not worry about losing your kid's pictures.  Or you could get this to back up all the computers in your house:

2TB external hard disk.  $129.  For not much more you can get one that attached to your network, and you don't have to schlep the drive from computer to computer (if all you computers are near each other, you could do this with a USB hub).

Also, remember that your smart phone can also be a backup for music and pictures.  Even if your house burns down and you lose all your backups, you might have all your pix on your phone.  More backups is better, because two is one and one is none.

Just a word to the wise.

* I don't have any relationship with TigerDirect, just bought a bunch of stuff from them in the past.