Simple backup tips to avert disaster

LOS ANGELES — Recently, one of my colleagues was in a total tizzy. She'd been working on a project and then — poof — her hard drive crashed, and she lost everything.

Now, in this day and age, you'd figure that we all know better, but sometimes we don't.

We're surrounded by hard drives, USB sticks and online tools that can back up our data. But often, for whatever reason, we just don't take the time to use the tools.

So, for my friend Eileen, and all the others out there who haven't gotten around to backing up, but know they need to, here's a primer of options:

-- E-mail important files to yourself. That way, you're assured to have an internet backup.

-- Buy three hard drives. The drives will eventually fail. They all do, but with three of them, you'll only lose the data on one, hopefully. You can get a decent 1 terabyte drive on Amazon for as little as $50, so get three. Use one of your drives to back up everything, and then store it somewhere else, in case of a fire or flood. Have the other two drives on your desk, with double backups of everything.

-- Use a cloud backup service. Dropbox and Google Drive are the easiest, and most economical. Both charge $99 a year for 1 terabyte of data. I've heard some folks worry about getting their private data hacked from a cloud service, or you might have second thoughts about having all your data in bed with Google. I don't have an issue with either. I think my data is rather boring. But if you're on the side who doesn't want your data online, one last option:

-- CrashPlan is one of the many encrypted backup plans available, like Carbonite and Mozy. It charges $59.99 yearly, and once you install the app on your computer, each new file is backed up. as it's created. If you lose it, go to the CrashPlan app on your desktop to yank it back.

Finally, don't forget to back up your phone too. Apple gives you 5 GB of storage to back up your photos, e-mail, calendar and other data, which barely scratches the surface. You can also buy additional storage starting at 99 cents monthly for 20 GBs.

Go to Settings and iCloud on your Phone, and click the backup now button.

For an Android phone, check out the new Google Photos or Flickr app. All your camera phone photos are automatically backed up, the apps are free, so you really should give them a try.

And that's my backup download.

How do you copy your data? Tell me about it on Twitter, where I'm @jeffersongraham.