Geek to Live: Automatically back up your hard drive. When was the last time you backed up the important files on your computer? Last year when your best friend called in tears after the Blue Screen of Death ate her thesis?
Yeah, I thought so.

Hard drives fail. It's a fact of computing life. It's not a matter of whether or not your computer's disk will fry, it's a matter of when. The question is how much it will disrupt your life.

Don't expect yourself to remember to back up your data, or stack your closet full of burned CD's or DVD's. Today I am going to set up automated nightly, weekly, monthly local and off-site backups for your PC using free software. Once you get this up and running, you'll never have to worry about losing data again.

Explore a disk image without burning a disk. Free software DAEMON Tools allows you to mount nearly any CD or DVD image as though you'd already burned the disc. DAEMON Tools is a virtual cd/dvd-rom emulator. It is able to emulate nearly all known copy protections on the market today. A tool like DAEMON Tools can come in handy if you've backed up a lot of your CD or DVD-ROMs as ISOs. It can also come in handy to explore a disk image before burning it.

Sync your Mac with MySync. MySync seeks to do the work of .Mac without the premium. During it's public beta period (now), MySync is free. Once the software moves out of beta, expect a fee of about $30 (sorry). Either way, it's worth trying out as a substitute for .Mac while it's free.











Reveal Product Keys with ProduKey. Similar to previously-mentioned Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder, ProduKey is a Windows utility that displays the CD key of your PC's currently installed version of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. ProduKey also supports SQL Server and displays the product ID for each installation. After you run the program, you can easily save the information in a text file. If you still got your install disks but don't know your product keys, and have no idea where to find them, running a utility like this is a must. You never know what might happen, and it's always a good idea to be prepared for the worst. It could save you some money and quite a few headaches.

Why You Need a Linux live CD. Help2Go is running an article on why you (a Windows user) should download and burn your very own Linux live CD in prepartation for your darkest Windows hours. The live CD will take several minutes to load, includes a web browser, word processor, email and much more. But here is the beautiful part; it will read your windows files so that you can access your documents, photos and mp3 files that are on the hard drive. If you have a printer hooked up to your computer, you can print your files. If you have a CD burner you can burn your files to a CD to retrieve them from your Windows system.

Backup files with Mozy. Free application Mozy offers 2GB of secure, encrypted backup of your files.

What You Get (We're in beta, so these are subject to change!)

• 2GB of backup storage
• Block-level differential backup
• Open File support
• 128-bit SSL Support (to secure your data during transport)
• 448-bit Blowfish Encryption (to secure your data on our server)
• Continuous or Scheduled Backup Options
• Up to 4 restore sessions per month

It's free, but you pay the price of email advertisements in your inbox every now and then (nothing a dummy email address shouldn't be able to cure, I should think). And while 2GB isn't enough to backup your entire hard drive, I'm sure you could find a good use for it.