This is Steveer Robbins. Welcome to the Get It Done Guys, Quick and Dirty Tips, Tell Work Less, and Do More.

When I was at MIT, a friend of mine was finishing his thesis after seven long years of work.

It was going great. The artificial superintelligence he had painstakingly built was just starting to print out the plans for a faster-than-light

rocket ship. When his hard drive crashed, he did everything he could to try to save it, he even

took it to the disc drive specialists who tried to reconstruct it bit by bit, using very tiny

tweezers. Their efforts were to no avail. He lost everything. Seven years of work, lost.

And that, my friends, is why we don't have faster than

light travel today. But we would, if only he had backed up his data. Don't be him.

I know what you're thinking. Steve, or, did you fall into a time warp? No one loses data

anymore. That's a thing of the past. Alas, it isn't. We're so used to computers being

reliable that we often don't plan for when they fail. Things happen. Hard drives fail,

ransomware sneaks into your system and holds your files hostage. Backing up your data

simply means making a copy of it somewhere for safekeeping. Make local backups. A local backup is a copy of your data that you keep somewhere nearby.

Once upon a time, you could make a DVD or a CD with all your data on it as a backup.

And since those are read-only, they made really good backups because evil ransomware couldn't

harm a backup once you made it.

If you still have a DVD or a CD drive, you might

want to consider using one to make read-only backups of your data, but the computer industry is

migrating away from optical drives, so the days of the optical backup are numbered. USB hard

drives, however, are very affordable, and they get relentlessly cheaper year after year.

So now, to backup my

2 terabyte hard drive in my desktop machine, I just use a 4 terabyte USB drive, which is big

...