When it comes to losing important data, it has been said that there are only two kinds of people: those who have lost important data, and those who will. Files are lost due to accidental deletion, theft, natural disaster, and hard drive crashes. For those in the practice of law, losing a document could mean missing a deadline, failing to file a timely response, or worse.
Fortunately there are easy ways to back up documents.
1. Email yourself the document.
With many of the popular free email services offering ever expanding, or even unlimited storage space, one of the easiest and most cost effective ways to back up documents is to email documents to yourself. For law students and lawyers alike, it is also an easy way to back up daily updates on major projects. An added advantage to this is, if you are emailing yourself you work as it progresses, you can go back and look at prior versions of a document at any time.
2. Use Mozy to back up your personal documents.
This tip is especially useful for law students because non-commercial use of Mozy, an excellent back up program I have been using for over two years, is free for up to 2 GB. Mozy is a small program that sits in your system tray, and on a daily basis encrypts and backs up your documents to a remote server. While Mozy can be used to back up a wide array of file-types, you can choose to limit the files backed up to documents, while will maximize the utility of the free 2GB account. Mozy Free is also the perfect solution for attorneys who want to back up their personal documents.
For commercial use, Mozy has options starting at $3.95 + $0.50/GB per month. Another option for commercial users or users with a lot of data they want to back up is Carbonite, a service I have not used myself, but has received rave reviews from many professional users. Carbonite has the advantage of having a flat-rate of $49.95 for unlimited data storage.
3. Use SyncBack Free to back up your data to an external hard drive.
If you already have an external hard drive, using SyncBack is the easiest way to back up a folder or group of folders to be synced to your external hard drive on a regular basis. Once you set up a back up profile, each time you run the program it will scan your folders for any changes and then update the folders on the external hard drive with the latest versions of the documents and add any new documents to the remote location. Because external hard drives can be stolen, I suggest using TrueCrypt, one of the most respected pieces of open source software, that encrypts your data to encrypt your external hard drive. It can also be used to encrypt USB keys.
Even if you are backing up to an external hard drive, remember to back up your data remotely either through email, or one of the services listed above to ensure your data is recoverable in the event of a natural disaster, theft, or other local phenomena.
Good luck, and stay safe!
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