Data Without Borders

Tragedy struck yesterday morning. Performing my normal Sunday morning responsibilities as the designated technical export for our youth group, I was setting up the Sunday school classrooms to play a couple video clips. Boring stuff mostly, but one was the scene from The Last Crusade with Indiana taking the leap of faith to reach the Holy Grail. Awesome. Anyway, I finished the setup and my laptop borked. Just gone. Like all the internal components completely disappeared. Unfortunately I had to do my job so I set my computer aside and hopped to a back-up machine. The entire morning I just figured that my little Acer, my mobile writing machine, was a goner.

After I did the standard plug/unplug/remove battery shuffle (which didn't solve anything), I hopped on the interwebs and discovered that this is a pretty common problem for Acer machines. I was able to fix and update the bios, but the scare really got me thinking about data back-up and what steps I should take to avoid a real disaster in the future.

Being the avid PSP gamer that I am, I was instantly reminded of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker and the Militaires Sans Frontières or MSF for short. I need a solution that is essentially data without borders. A means to access all of my data from any machine. My first thought was Dropbox, which I have, but only a measly 3.25 GB free account. The only problem is that I need my 3.25 GB account to transform into one of those free 16 GB accounts. To do that, I have to recruit users to Dropbox. And I'm doing that with some assistance and success. But I need a better option.

Lifehacker posted a timely article about backing-up data today and it was a stern reminder that I'm not doing everything that I can to keep my information safe from the inevitable failure of technology. That's correct people. Technology will fail. Stuff will break. The glass is already broken. So is my laptop.