Five Steps To Back Up Your Digital Life Word Count: 390 Summary: Answering basic questions about the software each company owns can play a vital role in the success of any merger or acquisition. Keywords: Five Steps To Back Up Your Digital Life Article Body: More and more, our lives have gone digital. We're quickly filling up our hard drives with digital photos, music, videos and documents, and in doing so we're flirting with digital disaster. Think about it: What would happen if you lost all that data on your hard drive? In a millisecond your family photos, home movies, years of work, and digital music collection could vanish forever. It could cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars to have a data- recovery service attempt to get the lost data back, but there's no guarantee they'd be successful. This is a disaster that doesn't have to happen. With today's advances in external storage and backup solutions, backing up your digital assets can be done easily and automatically. With an external hard drive such as the Maxtor OneTouch™ solution, you won't be forced to rummage through a pile of CDs/DVDs if you need to restore something. It's all stored in one location. Just supply power to the drive, plug it into a PC or Mac via a USB or FireWire port, pop in the included disk, and follow the simple setup wizard. In just a few minutes, you'll be able to automatically back up your entire hard drive every night. If new data can't wait, press the glowing button to start an immediate backup. If you're connected to a home or small business network, look for a shared storage device, such as the Maxtor Shared Storage Plus solution that plugs into a wired or wireless router and can automatically back up everyone's computer data on the local network to one location. The good news is that getting started on a backup program is simple. • Develop a backup schedule-back up data daily or, at a minimum, weekly. • Back up everything-no need to sort through every file and folder. Invest in a storage solution that's twice the size of your internal hard drive to give your system room to grow. • Do it automatically-set it and forget it. Use a solution that's easy to set up and provides automatic backups. • Rotate backups-for added protection in case of theft or natural disaster, use two drives and rotate one off-site. • Don't procrastinate. Unfortunately, the need to back up data is often a lesson learned from a bitter experience. Don't let it happen to you. Modern technology can help you be sure your digital family memories are safe.