Should I backup online?

Until recently I kept all my files on an external hard drive. So far, so good. Last year my laptop just stopped working. One day it was fine and the next day kapowee it won't boot up. Lost everything. Luckily I had copied a lot of my files onto Microsoft's SkyDrive so that was great. But I hadn't been diligent about keeping it updated and unfortunately lost a lot of information. After that happened I decided to stop using my local hard drive and use an external hard drive. I was feeling pretty smart about that when one day my husband brought up the idea that ... even an external hard drive can fail. Duh, why didn't that occur to me? Now I'm using Microsoft Mesh. It's a free service and I'll admit it doesn't give you much space and isn't real easy to figure out but at least I could recover my files if I needed to.

What's your story? Are you backing up your files? According to a recent article by Kim Komando

• 43% of people lose irreplaceable files every year
• Only about 3 out of 100 stolen laptops are recovered
• Thousands of files are lost every year to disasters like fires, floods, etc.
• Up to 13% of hard drives crash in their first year

Kim recommends an online service called Carbonite. We like using MozyPro for our business and may be switching for our personal use as well. But what ever you decide to use - just use something. Don't find yourself in that 43% category with no backup of your data. Here are a few ideas:

• Online backups (like Carbonite, or MozyPro)
• Online backups for free - Microsoft's SkyDrive, or Mesh
• Copy files to an external hard drive
• Copy files to a CD or DVD

One further note I would add is to be sure and backup your email and contact information. That is one of the things I lost when my laptop crashed - I still don't have all the contacts back - and there were lots of emails that I was keeping and now can't recover.