The simplest way to keep files safe is to upload them over your internet connection to a specialist backup provider. You’ll find a number on the net, most using the same conventional technology to compress important files that have changed on your computer and store them elsewhere.

This works well, but a new kid on the block is much smarter. Data Deposit Box (www.datadepositbox.com) is one of the best products I’ve seen in years, something you have to try to believe. DDB tackles the main problem of conventional backup: what happens if your work gets lost only minutes before it is backed up? With normal technology, you could lose a day’s work or more. With DDB, you don’t, because this remarkable service backs up your work as you create it. Download the free software — you get a 30-day trial before being charged for anything — and you can watch this in action. You write a letter, close the file and, seconds later, DDB’s little robot, which you have to make visible to witness working, dispatches the changes to a safe location on the web. You can restore them from there using any net connection, and keep backups of earlier versions.

Even better, you can run any number of computers off the same DDB account. So, your business desktop, your notebook and the children’s machine can all keep filing to the same location. Go online with WiFi at the airport and the service will back up work you produce there too.

It’s amazing — and so are the prices. You pay only for what you use, at the rate of one US cent per megabyte, with no minimum fee. A modest backup of 200MB will cost a shade over £1 a month, and an entire gigabyte of data will be stored securely for less than £5.50.

DDB is smart in knowing which files to back up, but turn off your music and possibly photo folders, which are often huge, and thus impractical and expensive to back up this way. You can secure those at home using recordable DVDs, but the simpler solution, particularly if you have more than one computer, is an external hard drive that you can share between Windows computers, provided the main host PC is switched on.

Buffalo’s smart LinkStation hard drive offers an intriguing alternative. You can plug it into a USB port and use it directly, but this device also

has its own little computer built in. If you connect it to the back of your network hub — a broadband router, say — it becomes a true shared drive, visible to anyone on the network, wired or unwired, without the need for special software.

You can back up to it, and store music and video to be distributed around the house. The truly nervous could add Acronis’s excellent True Image (www.acronis.com; about £30) and back up an entire computer, software, operating system and all. With TI on board, you could re-create a crashed machine in its entirety.

The LinkStation is a doddle to set up and reasonably quiet in operation, though not silent, so tuck it away in a corner. Price depends on storage size, with a 120GB model coming in at about £180. It should last for donkey’s years, along with anything you store on it — provided, of course, the house doesn’t burn down.

david.hewson@sunday-times.co.uk

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