You know the scenario - you've worked through the night on a project that the boss needs first thing in the morning. It's 3am and you save your work locally on your PC. You decide not to check the work into your GIT repository or to copy the files into your Dropbox folder. You shut down the pc and go to sleep. A few hours later you wake up, go to fire up the PC and then....nothing.

How does technology know to fail on us when we need it most?!

In the past I've been burnt by this and I know dozens of friends who've called me over the years looking for help to get their files off a broken hard drive or recover some photos that they can't live without.

"I meant to get around to backing up."

"I just don't have the time to worry about backups."

"It would be super expensive to backup - I've 100's of GB of files/images/videos"

Luckily, these days it's a lot easier to backup your files. Services from Dropbox and Google's Drive are great if you're just after a few GB of space for your text docs and other smaller files but if you're looking for more space and something that will automate the process for you then you'll need to look for companies like BlackBlaze or Barracuda who offer unlimited backups for around $5/month. 

Think about that for a moment - for just $5/m you could have total piece of mind and never even have to worry about manually backing up your data. You probably spend more money getting coffee during the month, which in my mind makes it completely worth it.

If you live in an area where fast broadband isn't an option and you don't want your connection to be a bottleneck for backing up, the great news is that external hard drives have never been cheaper. $50 will get you hundreds of GB of space these days - more than enough for the average user.

The point of today's Friday Tip is to just give a gentle reminder to those of you out there who don't currently backup. There's never been a better time to use one of the online services or to grab that extra spare external drive.

Don't wait for your tech to let you down when you need it most.