With the start of a new year, I’m taking a little time out of my vacation to make sure everything is safe, secure, and backed up.

First is the local backup copy. Being an OSX user, my application of choice is SuperDuper. If you are a PC user, Acronis has excellent backup software. SuperDuper is $30 and worth every penny. It lets me duplicate my hard drive to an external drive. In the case of a HD crash, I can simply boot of my external backup drive with no down time.

SuperDuper is the wildly acclaimed program that makes recovery painless, because it makes creating a fully bootable backup painless. Its incredibly clear, friendly interface is understandable, easy to use, and SuperDuper’s built-in scheduler makes it trivial to back up automatically.

A local backup copy is great, but that isn’t worth a shit if someone breaks into my house or a fire engulfs my residence. The second move is to have a remote backup copy. Online backups are really important, and up until about 3 days ago, were left out of my backup scheme. Not anymore. I am not backing up all important documents over the interwebs using BackBlaze.  If you are a PC user I recommend JungleDisk. Regardless you can look at this handy chart of online backup services to decide which is the best for you.

You download a tiny application that installs in three clicks and doesn’t require a credit card or any information to start using it. This online backup application automatically finds all your photos, music, documents, and other irreplaceable files—no matter where they are on your hard drive—and compresses and securely encrypts them. When you’re not using your computer, it sends them over the Internet to the remote Backblaze datacenters.

BackBlaze gives you unlimited storage and a handly little OSX to assist with backups for only $5/month.

So do yourself a favor and start off the new year right – make sure your data is backed up. I know I sleep better at night knowing that in the worst case scenario I can recover my files.