Kind of like in real estate where the three most important words are location, location, location.
Location is an important concept as well in backing up your photos, music, accounts, letters, recipes, documents, etc. Where you are going to keep your backup is an important consideration as well as how much data you have to backup, how often you want to backup and how you wish to retrive your backup data.
You might want to keep your backup close at hand on a DVD or CD in a jewel case on a bookshelf. You could put everything on a flash drive that you can keep in a drawer. If you have more than these will hold, you could opt for a removable hard disk--a little more expensive but handy and dependable and easy to store. Retrieval is easy with these methods.
If you have a business on a network, you will want something that can backup your data frequently and automatically. You might choose tape backup. While tape backup can be expensive and retrieval might not be as easy, you can erase and reuse them, schedule a backup every night and save long-term only what is needed for your auditor.
But remember, if you store your backup at home or the office, flood, fire, tornadoes and accidents can wipe out not only your computer but your backup as well.
If you only have a few things that are important to you, you could email them to yourself and save the email. Your service provider backs up their data religiously and redundantly. But if you are like me, you have all kinds of files that, if lost, would make you feel diminished. Emailing everything to yourself is not practical. Still, you can virtually email all of it to yourself by selecting to subscribe to an online backup service-- also called an online storage service.
Yes! That's right, online backup!
Is that safe, you are asking? A very important question when transferring data over the internet. Encrypted transfer and password protection are the hallmarks of on-line storage services.
Check out online storage services at
http://online-storage-service-review.toptenreviews.com/ for comparisons between companies.
For an indepth discussion of various backup options check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backup
Backing up is easy if you keep your files organized. Keep your pictures in My Pictures, keep your documents and other files in My Documents or create file folders with names that are meaningful to you so that when it is time to backup you know just what needs to be saved.
Remember the three most important words in computing: backup, backup, backup.