A couple of weeks ago, some jerk stole the laptop one of my clients was loaning me. This royally sucked for several reasons:
- This laptop allows me to be productive during my commute and when otherwise off-site.
- I am in the midst of several projects, with data critical to each of them all on -- you guessed it -- the laptop.
- And yeah, I had to shamefacedly explain to my boss and my colleagues how I managed to lose a company laptop in the restroom on our floor, and what I was doing with a laptop there in the first place (let me clarify this now: I was on my way out to a friend's going away party, and was brushing my teeth).

Anyway, I spent (unpaid) overtime redoing the research and planning I had notated on that computer... only to discover (both with a huge sigh of relief and head-smacking frustration) that *ALL* of my work had been backed up. I was smarter than I had remembered, since I had not only saved many files directly to the client's server, but had set up OneNote to do regular backups to my desktop.

I was both smart and lucky. And now, with the tips below, you can be smart and lucky, too.* * *

My home computer is now once again delightfully protected due to two purchases I've made recently:

- An external hard drive (a Maxtor OneTouch, but any external hard drive'll do)

- Some fabulous (and fabulously inexpensive software) I just discovered called SyncBackSE. $15 gets you a not-so-glossy/slick-looking but amazingly powerful and configurable program that -- get this -- will even back up open files like Outlook PST files! No more having to shut down Outlook before nightly backups.

And despite all the neato geek options, I was able to set up two backup profiles in under two minutes, literally. Later on, I'll play with some of the in-depth stuff, such as configurable compression options and file-compare details, but so far I'm just tickled at how easy and fast and, yeah, cheap this solution is!

Yes, it's only for Windows folks. Sorry Macsters. :| And hey, if any Mac people are reading this, please feel free to suggest great backup programs for the Mac. EVERYONE should be doing backups!

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