If you do not have off-site backups of your documents today would be a good day to start. Having a backup of your critical documents on an external drive that sits next to your computer will help if you have a disk crash or other catastrophe to your computer but will do nothing in the event of a natural disaster – think hurricane Sandy – a theft – I doubt that the thief would only take your computer and leave the external drive – and you can fill in the rest. As far as offsite backup goes there are many choices but I settled on Dropbox for a number of reasons. For starters Dropbox works with any device – Mac, PC, Tablet and Smartphone – be it iPhone or Android. Beyond that it is as simple to use as possible.  Establish your Dropbox account and start loading files. 2 GB of storage is free and 100 GB will cost you about $100.00 per year (actually $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year). Once done you can access any of your files from any internet connected device. PC Magazine reviewed Dropbox and here is their BOTTOM LINE “Dropbox is a superbly implemented, cloud-based, automatic, file-synchronization service that’s ideal for working with files you can store in a single folder.” You can read the full review at http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2343852,00.asp. Beyond that, anytime we are storing data online security is of prime importance. Dropbox uses Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and AES-256 bit encryption and you can find a full description of their security protocol at https://www.Dropbox.com/help/27/en.

There are many online backup options available, Carbonite, Mozy and Sugarsync to name a few but for my money Dropbox wins.