I’m not sugar coating anything today, guys. If you don’t have a backup plan for your digital life, you’re going to lose everything eventually.

A few years ago, I was working on my laptop computer at the kitchen table. Our dog Jimmy ran through the room, and got tangled in the power cord of my external hard drive, sending it crashing to the floor. That external hard drive was rendered useless immediately, and I was completely distraught over losing a couple of years of art and design work.

My husband gave the broken drive to a computer forensics friend of his. A guy whose job it is to find all the files that creeps never want found. He wasn’t able to recover a single thing from that hard drive.

We live and we learn.

Like everything I do online now, from social media to building websites, my backup plan is constantly being re-evaluated. It’s even more important now, so I can keep my design clients‘ files ready for use at a moment’s notice. And also, there’s more than a few cute kid photos being taken these days. I did think I had lost some of Phil’s baby pics in the midst of my horrible technology summer of 2013 and I won’t lie. I acted like a toddler who doesn’t get to have any more cake. (Until I found the photos I had lost. Then all was well again.)

So what’s your backup plan?

It’s all about coming up with a multi-faceted approach to protecting your computer and your files. Hit your backups from more than one angle, and you’ll be covered. Here’s some things to consider when you’re creating your own backup plan.

Backup Plan Part 1: Internet Security

I used to use the free version of Avira antivirus software for my virus protection for years. My new I.T. guy wanted me to change to ESET, but ohhhh I knew better. The free Avira was cheap like me, and it got the job done.

Until I got a virus last year.

Enter ESET virus protection. It’s top notch security that my I.T. guy trusts to protect my big ol’ beefy desktop pc.

Backup Plan Part 2: Online Cloud Backups

Once you’ve got your virus protection handled, get to work backing up all of your files. The key is to do it in such a way that if your home computer was destroyed, you’d still have your work. That’s where Carbonite comes into play. Set it up, and it runs in the background. Every time you update a file on your pc, it gets backed up to the cloud. This is a link to where you can pick up their home version on Amazon. If you need something a little beefier like me, best to pick it up directly from Carbonite.com – I use their Pro plan, which includes backups of one external hard drive, and next day delivery of all of your backups on a hard drive if your computer blows up and you need all your files like, now.

So think about this – if you get that more extensive backups package that includes an external hard drive… You could in theory disconnect that drive from your primary computer for an evening and plug it into your laptop, back stuff up from your laptop onto your external hard drive, and hook that bad boy back up to your desktop pc. So you’re backing up two computers to the cloud. Game, set, match.

No lie, Carbonite’s saved my bacon more than once, and I have used their “send me everything on an external hard drive” option once when I thought I was going to have a heart attack over losing files.

Backup Plan Part 3: External Hard Drive for Backups

And since we’re talking about external hard drives, let me quote an old Oingo Boingo song.

“No one lives forever.”

That’s especially true for external hard drives. Don’t buy one thinking it’s your be all end all place to save everything. It’s only going to last you maybe five years. Probably less.

My external hard drive that I’ve had for about 2 years now just got replaced. Thankfully this time it’s not completely dead, and I have the luxury of moving some things onto my new external hard drive before it’s totally dead. But that’s 2 years. Think of all the pictures you could take in 2 years, and think of them all vaporizing… POOF… into the ether.

My plan of attack with external hard drives is buy them large enough to be useful, but not so large that you forget that you need to archive things on those to DVDs from time to time.

Backup Plan Part 4: Hard Copies on DVD

DVDs are so 1999. But they’re also tangible items that will store your digital data forever if you take care of them. If you’re done with something on your external hard drive, like say there’s a client who went out of business and you’re not going to need those files anymore, save em to DVD and put them in a folder on your external drive called “Archived”. Then, if your drive starts to get kind of full, you know those folders are already backed up and they can be the first ones to get cleared off the drive to create more disk space.

Don’t Forget Your Website Backups

This is all well and good for the computer you’re working on, and the files that are saved on it. But don’t forget – if you’re a blogger, if you’re running a business that has an online presence, you need to be backing up your website as well. We can help you with that.

So what’s your backup plan? Do you do any steps that weren’t covered here?

Or do you have any horror stories of your own to share from a time before you started backing everything up correctly? I wanna hear about it in the comments!