I know a student whose laptop was stolen recently.
The good news: the laptop was recovered the same day.
The bad news: the hard drive had already been erased.

So, let me ask: Have you backed up your computer recently?
Do you have a plan to deal with a data disaster?
What would you do if you lost all the work you have done this week?

Use Dropbox
We all know we should do regular hard drive backups. But backing up is a pain, so we rarely do it. That’s why I love Dropbox.

Dropbox places a folder named “My Dropbox” inside the “My Documents” folder on Windows. (It does something similar on a mac.) When you save a file to “My Dropbox” it automatically backs it up to a secure web server as well as keeping a copy on your hard drive.

All my mission critical files are saved to Dropbox—like my nearing 200 page Dissertation/Project. This gives me automatic backups of my most important files every time I work on them. No thought on my part, no extra effort, and I always have on offsite backup of files I cannot afford to lose.

I also use Dropbox to automatically sync files between multiple computers and to access files from any computer with an internet connection—even from my phone.

Dropbox offers 2GB of online backup for free. Check it out: Dropbox.