Oh No!

Not a pretty expression on anyone's face, especially mine. I've been known to do it before, specifically after a hard drive crash. And no, I didn't have the "glad my stuff was backed up" happy ending. An acquaintance came over today to see if she could salvage anything from the remains of her hard drive. As it turns out, the drive was history, along with every photo she'd taken for the last two years or so. Luckily, now there are great solutions available to prevent this type of disaster, and it won't happen to me again.

SyncBack, by 2BrightSparks is currently backing up all of my documents to an external hard drive. Even better, it will re-sync all of the data every 3 days, at 3:00 AM, automatically. More often? Less often? At a different time? You bet. The scheduling flexibility is great. Best of all, there's a free version. Downsides? There's no Mac version, although I think iSync might do what I want it to, but probably not for free. I have to look into it more, but I think it requires .Mac to do the stuff I want it to do.

I don't think I have to worry about my hard drive tanking my data again. It's a good feeling.