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World Backup Day: 1 TB hard drive giveaway from OWC
As the first World Backup Day winds down, we've got one last giveaway, but it's a doozy. If you've followed our urgent pleas for better backup behavior today, your patience may now be rewarded. Whether you back up to the cloud, to a local drive or RAID array, or to a stack of CD-Rs, spare a few minutes between now and midnight to think about your digital footprints. How much would you lose, irrecoverably, if your hard drive coughed and died tonight? Which pictures, videos, projects would be gone? What source code, designs or daydreams would evaporate? Take a moment, make a plan, back up. It's hard to say it any better than Merlin Mann did last year, so go read his exhortation, then come on back and enter our giveaway. The final prize is within reach: the OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro 1 TB external drive, a quad-interface model with enough room to keep you backing up for weeks. Just leave a comment telling us about your best backup 'save' and we'll enter you to win. (By the bye, if you want to come hang out with your fellow TUAW readers and talk backups, Mac apps or multiplayer iOS games -- there's a meetup for that.) Official Rules: Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia, and residents of Canada (except Quebec) who are age 18 and older. To enter leave a comment on this post. The comment must be left before Saturday April 2 at 11:59 PM EDT. You may enter only once. 2 winners will be selected in a random drawing. Prize: One OWC Mercury Elite-AL 1 TB hard drive (ARV $147.99). Click Here for complete Official Rules.
World Backup Day: Ad-hoc backups to the cloud & more giveaways
Happy World Backup Day! The only safe way forward is to back up; that's why we've joined the cause for data saving with tips, techniques and giveaways all day today. As Steve mentioned earlier today, there are lots of cloud-based backup services eager to help you protect your data while solving the onsite/offsite conundrum. A backup of uncertain status in a single location isn't much better than no backup at all -- for one thing, it gives you a sense of confidence that your data is protected when it might not be. Getting your data tucked away with Dolly Drive, Backjack, Backblaze, Mozy, Carbonite or CrashPlan may not be the fastest or cheapest approach, but sooner or later it may save your bacon. Compare and contrast plans here. (Lifehacker has a full rundown on how CrashPlan can help you sleep soundly at night, knowing your backups are solid.) Even if you're not up for a full-on cloud backup solution (whether due to bandwidth or budget constraints), there are still some surprisingly easy ways to back up your key files in the cloud, and do it for cheap or free. All of these approaches require a bit more thinking than the automated tools above, but if you're the sort of person who makes copies of your bank statements or saves your dry cleaning receipts, then you can probably get into these habits, too.
World Backup Day: Turn, turn, turn + more giveaways
Happy World Backup Day! We can't really emphasize this strongly enough: you need good backups, and you need them now. That's why we've joined the cause for data saving with tips, techniques and giveaways all day today. For Mac users running Leopard or Snow Leopard (10.5 or 10.6), the good news about backups is that you've got a pretty solid tool already installed and ready to roll: Time Machine. We've covered the basics on Time Machine before, but there are a couple of ways to supplement and improve your TM experience -- making your backups safer and simpler. Ask an IT professional about backups, and you might hear a maxim like "If you haven't verified that you can restore the data, it's not a backup; if you haven't made at least two copies and sent one of them offsite, it's not a backup either." Most Mac owners would do well to follow these guidelines, as it's far too easy for a single backup drive (especially one sitting right next to your computer) to fall victim to trouble and woe.
