Backing up your computer, yesterday I wrote a quick post to remind all of you how important it can be and how it saved my bacon with my laptop. Many of you have asked what I use and the cost of my system, so here goes.

Many of us remember the old tape driven back ups that we set up to back up at night and with the memory we currently use with larger photos, bigger files and more details these tape drives are pretty much non-existent today.

The tapes of yesteryear were expensive and not as reliable or easy to restore as one would think. I remember having to restore a time or two and oh my, what a pain. Then some of us got CD burners oh that was a great system - how many CDs does it take to back up 100GB hard drive that is 80% full - someone else out there can do the math, my answer is.... Way too many and who has the time?

Today we have a lot of options, from online services that you pay a small monthly fee to actual external hard drives. Personally I use a system by Western Digital called "My Book" it is the size of a book and resembles a book - it connects to my computers with a USB cord or a firewire cord. They do have a fancier option which if I ever need a larger system I will upgrade to that is wireless and works on your wireless network.

I use the My Book; the first one I purchased is a 320 GB system, the cost of this is $99 to $150 depending on where you purchase it. I bought mine at Best Buy - this link will take you to a few of the choices they have. http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=pcmcat77500050000&type=category

I was not sure I would find the system to work well for me so I started small, if I were to be in the market today I would most likely buy the wireless one only because I have 3 computers to back up. If you are working with one computer or even two you may find that it is not a necessity to spend more than the $99.

One of the features I like about the book - is you can use it as an extra hard drive. I can load files on it and when it is connected to the computer you can access the files and save them on the book...

In my previous post several people mentioned the online backup services. I have never used one, and would struggle to do so because of the speed of our internet connections in Central Oregon. I have DSL which runs about the speed of a 56k modem, uploading all the photos I have would take an eternity. If your files are small and you are comfortable with having your data in cyberspace you might want to check out a few of them.

So, I hope this helps some of you that asked the question of what I use. Let me know if I can help any further.