Computer failure! And how to hopefully avoid the lost-file freakout

As the school year is winding down and finals week has begun, my mind always tries to think of the worst case scenario, just so when that doesn't happen, I'm excited.

One of my Finals '08 Worst Case Scenario is a computer failure - a complete loss of everything on my hard drive. I'm not going to lie... My laptop is pretty much my life. It's got homework, old homework, bank statements, music, pictures, internets... everything. It's beginning to show physical signs of wear - there's a worn out spot from where my hand sits on the computer, some worn out spots from where I pick up my laptop, the keys I use a lot are a little worn down (plus the right side of my space bar... I only space with my right hand). My laptop is only two years old so the internal stuff should be working fine. It's just physically showing my love.

Anyway, as I internally semi-freak out about that, I'm looking into new ways of backing up my hard-drive. In the past I've burned discs, but that often takes a lot of discs and a lot of time. Plus, if everything in my apartment gets burned up, that doesn't really help me much.

I'm thinking about investing in an external hard drive and backing up my info there. Just from a little bit of searching, those tend to be $100+ (which I won't be able to afford until I start my summer job... but I'm not planning on doing anything until after finals anyway). Does anyone use these and are they any good?

Another option I've come across is Mozy Online Backup, which for a monthly fee of $5 backups everything over the internet. I'm kind of leaning towards this one, personally. Actually, I just noticed they have a free 2GB service. I'm going to try this out in the meantime to test it out. If anyone is interested in testing it out too, here's a referral link that gets both of us extra storage space.

So this was meant to be a post asking for advice on backing up files, and now I'm telling you to test out this Mozy site. A bit of a turn-around... but that's ok. I'm still interested in what people use and how effective it is. It has to be financially smart, as well. I'm not wasting money on something I'll hardly ever use.

Time to write a paper about 25th Hour. Bacher out.

And my lost necklace and lost Daily Show tickets were the only two disappointments of the weekend (apart from it raining and being cloudy). Thanks for cheering me up, friends, mom and Andrew!