Lifehacker has put up a guide to help us geeks keep our data safe. I do monthly data backups on my computer, but if a disaster happened at the end of a month, I would be out of luck. Now for this project you need some pretty decent equipment, but it is worth it if you are a programmer or designer.

Hard drives fail. It’s a fact of computing life. It’s not a matter of whether or not your computer’s disk will fry, it’s a matter of when. The question is how much it will disrupt your life.

Don’t expect yourself to remember to back up your data, or stack your closet full of burned CD’s or DVD’s. Today we’re going to set up automated nightly, weekly, monthly local and off-site backups for your PC using free software. Once you get this up and running, you’ll never have to worry about losing data again.