If you haven't been watching Twitter or FaceBook (specifically me on Twitter or FaceBook), I had a hard drive crash on Friday.  It isn't good... I used to back up pretty regularly, but had kind of drifted away from it lately.  It isn't good. 

The hard drive has started clicking and might cost $$$$$$ to rebuild.  But this isn't about that. 

This is about backing up.  There is a new 320GB drive in my Tablet and IF I can recover the data from the old drive, it will have about 80 gigs of data and programs.  So...  Here are a few options. 

• An external hard drive with regular back-ups...  Not terribly expensive, but a bit of a hassle.  Imaging is possible...
  
• A NAS (Network Attached Storage) device....  Fairly expensive, but with some software packages, extremely convenient.  Imaging is possible...
  
• Carbonite...  $55/year...  Not expensive, not inconvenient, but not available as a storage device, just back-up.  No imaging...
  

We are actually thinking of the NAS with Carbonite backing that up... 

word to the wise...

Back up your junk.  In fact, imaging hard drives on a regular basis would be a great idea.  Imaging is making a copy of the WHOLE hard rive, and not just backing up data.  With an image, you have a literal clone of the hard drive.  This means that after a crash you could be EXACTLY where your last imaging left you.  No having to dig for CDs to reinstall programs and downloading updates and such... 

What do you think?