Friday the 13th: Refuge in the backup

Ok, it’s a lousy title for a movie, but it is a great remind­er to review and execute your data backup strategies, both at home and online.

Why Fri­day the 13th?
Simply, it’s a day-date com­bin­a­tion that hap­pens infre­quently, almost ad-hoc. When it does occur, you can eas­ily plan to take time out to per­form your main­ten­ance chores.

It’s also a very mem­or­able day. In fic­tion, bad things hap­pen on Fri­day the 13th — so the best way to pre­vent those bad things from hap­pen­ing to you, is to take pro­act­ive measures…and what bet­ter day to remem­ber to do that than Fri­day the 13th!

Some things to do

• Backup your home com­puter systems
• Backup your blog(s)
• Backup your oth­er con­tent stored in the cloud (flickr, Google Docs, iTunes video & music)
• Remove and delete pro­grams you’ve not used for a while
• Review and backup your pass­word & account information
• Purge your online email accounts of old mail
• Defrag your hard drives

More read­ing
I’ve writ­ten a few posts about backups and main­ten­ance before, so if you want to dig into the detail, here’s a handy list, sor­ted by backup tag.

Life­hack­er pos­ted this great over­view of a per­son­al backup sys­tem worth check­ing out.