The sheer amount of digital property we all have now can be tough to manage. Where did you save that photo? You know someone sent you a document, but to which e-mail address? If your house is flooded — let's say — will your data be safe?

Spend less time searching

It's nearly 2014, so you're presumably familiar with the concept of the cloud — storing data online so that you can access it from any Internet-connected computer. Most likely, the first service you ever used that did something like this was an e-mail service like e-mail from Gmail, Hotmail (now Outlook) or Yahoo! Mail.

There are risks of entrusting your e-mail and other data to the cloud — and as a friend says often, nothing is really free — but for many consumers, the convenience has been convincing enough.

Dropbox and Google Drive are the big players here, with Box and Apple's iCloud appealing to specific subsets of consumers. Microsoft's SkyDrive is a bit of a latecomer, but we know Microsoft has plenty of money and motivation to keep pace with Google and Apple.


Think of these services — many of which offer entry-level storage free, and paid levels for more space — like you think of your web-based e-mail. What you store in your Dropbox folders can be accessed from your computer at home, at work, on your tablet or on your smartphone. You can organize them just like you'd organize a folder system on your home computer, and you can tell them to sync each time you start up, so files are stored online as well as locally (or not). You'll always know where everything is: in the cloud.

Spend less time recovering

When backing up data, redundancy is the name of the game. A solid data-backup plan can save untold hours of work and consternation in case of a technical or natural disaster.

You may have your kids' photos on your computer and on an external hard drive in case of a hard-drive failure — but if something happens to your house, you'll be up a creek. Having a backup in a second geographic location can save your hide.

Backing up regularly to a hard drive that you can store at a relative's house or, again, in the cloud, is the way to go for basic stuff like photos you've taken and music you've bought. If you get into a good rhythm of backing things up and have something a little more sensitive to store, you could also stash a hard drive in a safe deposit box.

For a spendier option, there are also enormous storage devices that claim to be fireproof and waterproof. One example is the ioSafe 214 NAS RAID. The 2-terabyte version is listed at $899.99 and comes with one year of data-recovery service — and claims to protect data from loss up to 1550 degrees Fahrenheit for half an hour and from being at a depth of 10 feet underwater for 72 hours.