Backups are one of those things that I keep meaning to do, and now that I'm traveling once or twice a month as an instructor, I decided recently that it was time to implement a solid backup plan.

Disaster Avoidance and Recovery

Imagine showing up to a class full of paying customers (or to your next important business client), opening your laptop and realizing that you've accidentally deleted the files you needed to use for your presentation. Or worse yet, imagine discovering the night before that your hard drive was fried and your system wouldn't start, or that it was stolen at the airport.

If I was in either of those situations, it'd be a complete disaster unless I had a way to reload my system with backup data. Even if I went out and bought a new laptop I'd still need a way to restore all my data and programs to to the way they were before I boarded the plane.

Backup Hardware

Affordability, Portability, and Reliability: My goal for a backup system was to find an affordable yet reliable combination of hardware and software to store my important data files on a portable hard drive, and be able to reload my entire system if necessary in less than an hour. My budget was $200, and in the end I came in at just under $190 with both hard drive and backup software.

My laptop's hard drive is 160GB, and most external USB hard drives are at least 250GB, so I knew size wasn't going to be an issue. I'd be able to backup my entire hard drive, in case I needed to do a full system restore. I'd also be able to backup individual files, in case I accidentally deleted certain files and needed to quickly get them back.

The Maxtor OneTouch 320GB external USB hard drive was on sale for just under $100, and came with it's own backup software (though I had been warned by my IT guys not to ever rely on any backup software that comes with a hard drive... more on that advice later, which turned out to be worth listening to).