Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope that your week has gone well and you have a wonderful weekend planned. Today I want to just share some links to help with backing up your data as it is an important and often overlooked step in protecting your files. Plus, the archivist in me just couldn’t resist passing along a couple of articles that weren’t in archival literature about backing up data. So let’s get to it.

Lifehacker has a good article on why Dropbox shouldn’t be your sole backup. While the tale is scary, it is a good reminder to back up your data in multiple locations. Happily, external hard drive prices have decreased a lot over the past few years, which makes it even more affordable to back up your files.

On a similar note, Gizmodo reports on how it only takes one bozo to kill your cloud data. Another reason to not rely on one cloud service to backup your data. When it comes to making sure you can access your digital files, it truly does come down to lots of copies keep stuff safe (but only if you have lots of copies in multiple places). Also, this reminds me of the great xkcd cartoon:

Finally, this is an interesting and useful tip from Lifehacker on how to test new external hard drive by doing a secure erase. I’ll have to remember to try this when I get a new external hard drive.

Hopefully these tips (and cautionary tales) will persuade you and your patrons about the importance of backing up your data. How do you back up your data? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Have a wonderful weekend full of all good things, dear readers. I’ll be back soon with more news and notes. Allons-y!