Last night a friend almost lost her entire business contact database, which reminded me to remind you: make a backup already! I use an extra hard drive at home for pictures and music and the like, because they won’t totally destroy my financial life if I lose them. However, for more important things, it’s nice to know that if your house burns down you can at least still have access to your important electronic documents.

Enter dropbox. It’s pretty simple: an app sits in the background and syncs documents to the web in a secure fashion. Your computer dies, and you’ve still got stuff online! Best part is, you get 2GB of storage free, which is likely well more than enough for all your non-media files. (You can get 50GB for $10/mo, or 100GB for $20/mo)

Even better though, it can sync both ways. Imagine you have a laptop and a desktop. Link both computers to your dropbox account, and changes made on one computer will automagically appear on the other. YET EVEN BETTER, it works even if one computer is a Mac, and the other a PC–it doesn’t care if you’re on Mac, Linux, or Windows, it works for them all!

Oh, wait, it gets even better. There’s an iPhone app for it as well. Checklists, spreadsheets, word documents, you can get it wherever you have technology!

Bottom line: get dropbox already, and quit tempting fate to crash your hard drive.

****Note****
If you want to back up your entire hard drive online, Mozy is a good option as well. It too offers 2GB of free online backups, but for home users unlimited backups are only $4.95/month. Businesses pay a bit more at $3.95 + $0.50/GB each month. The main drawback here is that it won’t do a multi-computer sync like dropbox does.