Best backup methods

>> Tom: You buy MP3's, take photos, write long love letters to Cloris Leachman, what you do, and you keep it all on your hard drive. Now if that hard drive crashes you're done for unless you backed up. I'm Tom Merritt from CNET.com with some of your best options for backing up on this edition of Insider's Secrets. ^M00:00:17 [ Music ] ^M00:00:26 >> Tom: Backing up your data is something we kind of beat people over the head with here at CNET, hard drives will crash you are in danger but what's the best way to backup? Now there are several ways to do this we're gonna discuss three, external hard drive, network attached storage and online services let's start with the external hard drive. Now obviously you don't want to backup to the same hard drive where the original files are that's just kind of silly the simplest method is to buy an external hard drive and backup to that. Our favorite here at CNET is the Clickfree Portable Backup it makes the process of backing up as simple as you can imagine. The software is stored on the drive so you just plug it in and tell it what to back up. You can also do it yourself though if you have an old hard drive laying around say from upgrading a Notebook just put it in a case like this. The Drobo is an excellent way to use multiple spare hard drives to create a large raid that gives you redundancy and that means if your computer hard drive and one of your back up hard drives fails your data is still safe on one of the other drives in the Drobo. If you have OS10 you can use Time Machine the built-in back up software to handle the backing up. For Windows Cobian is a free and open source piece of software or just use the built-in function in Windows Vista. The next step up is network attached storage this is a large hard drive usually attached to your router that multiple computers can backup to. Apple users can get the Time Capsule which works in tandem with Time Machine to do network back ups; this little Dongle from AddonX is about 60 bucks and can turn any external drive into a network drive you just plug in the Ethernet cable to the router and the USB from the drive into the Dongle, boom network attached storage or NAS if you want to sound unintelligible to your family members. If you got the Drobo as an external drive there's an attachment that will turn that into a network drive. And our favorite NAS solution is the Synology Disk Station you put the hard drive in it yourself and it becomes a network attached drive it also has the capability to communicate with the Xbox 360 and the PS3. We've reviewed many other options at CNET.com many of which come with a drive built in but the easiest option if you have the Internet capacity to handle it is online backup. Apple offers Mobile Me for its' users it can sync contacts, settings, etcetera but it maxes out at 60 GB and it's kind of expensive. Carbonite is a favorite for 50 bucks a year it backs up whatever you want working away quietly in the background. Fore file backups with some options for sharing look at Dropbox and BoxTop Net both have free options and give you more capacity if you pay a little more. Microsoft offers a couple of good options too Microsoft Mesh is in Beta at this recording and so freely offers to sync your folders it's limited to 5 GB but can keep several computers synced up. Microsoft's SkyDrive gives you 25 free Gigabytes and uses active sync to backup documents from one computer to the Sky, supports MAC's too. One last option I like is Jungle Disk they charge you 15 cents per Gigabyte with no monthly fee and that's the one I use and I really like it. So there you go people you have no excuse now not to backup. That's it for this Insider's Secret; I'm Tom Merritt for CNET.com. What are you doing your hard drive might be crashing right now go backup, now. ^E00:03:47