Nearly everyone these days is likely to be experiencing their very own digital data explosion. Almost on a daily basis we are all creating or downloading more and more digital content, in the form of documents, digital images, mp3 files etc. This means having a suitable backup strategy is becoming extremely important to ensure you have a copy of your data in case of any unfortunate incident. Fortunately it also becoming increasingly easy to setup “fire and forget” automatic approaches to the backup challenge.

To setup an automatic backup solution, you will need two things. Firstly an external hard drive with sufficient capacity to store multiple versions of all your data, and then some software to manage the process.

Software

If you are lucky enough to have a Mac running Panther then you will already have the excellent Time Machine included with the operating system. Other wise a nice choice would be EMC Retrospect 7.5 Pro which is available for Windows or older versions of Mac OS. Another alternative for Windows would be Symantec Norton Save & Restore. All these packages provide the ability to do an automatic backup on a regular basis.

Hardware

There are plenty of options available for the external hard drive. Some suggestions would be the Iomega MiniMax External 500GB Hard Drive which also comes in a 750 GB version, or the WD My Book Pro Edition External 500GB Hard Drive. Both of these drives look good, offer a choice of USB of Firewire connectivity, and will work well with all operating systems.