A good backup and recovery system is essential for a company of any size or individual. Unfortunately, company IT doesn’t always get the budget it needs, and the backup system does not seem to get the money that it needs. Well, if you would like to take responsibility for your own data in your computer and agree that you need a very good backup system, but you don’t have enough money to pull that off, this article was written with you in mind. Just because you have a small budget doesn’t mean you have to do without backup. The backup solutions in this article are meant for personal backup and can be implemented for a few hundred dollars – including hardware.

Most backup tools work on a schedule or on demand.

1. Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate editions include backup and restore. This feature allows you to create safety copies of your most important personal files on whatever schedule you choose. You can back up the whole drive or selected files to another drive or a DVD or even to a network location.
2. If you are diligent and don’t mind to do backup on your own on a regular basis, you can always copy data to removable drive such as portable hard disk, DVDs or thumb drives. Do not try to back up the data onto the same hard disk, as your back up will still be lost when your hard disk crash.  
3. If you do not have Windows 7 professional or ultimate editions or don’t like the hassle of manual back up, you may want to consider third party backup software. Do look out for features on various methods of backup such as incremental or differential;  the backup capabilities such as registry backup, address book backup, individual email backup; the output features such as backup to removable media, tape, FTP locations, online server; restores features such as replacing older files and duplicates, restore hard disk images, restore individual files; technical support such as live chat, telephone & email support, knowledgebase. Recommended software are NovaBackup and Acronis True Image Home 2011. Free backup software such as Macrium Reflect FREE and Easeus ToDo Backup 1.1 are available from download.cnet.com.
4. Online backup, also known as remote backup, allows you to regularly back up files, folders or the entire contents of a hard disk on a remote managed backup server.  When internet bandwidth gets bigger and cheaper, the remote files and folder appears as if they are stored on external hard drive. Encryption and password security help to ensure security and privacy.

But what if something happens to the files you are currently working on? Imagine you’ve spent hours editing an important document and suddenly there’s a power outage. That won’t be a problem if you’re using a real-time backup solution either by hardware or software mirroring method. Such products back up your files as they are being modified—and take very little in the way of system resources to run seamlessly in the background.

1. Hardware Mirror - Buy a RAID controller card and new hard disk of the same capacity and preferably same brand and model of your existing hard disk. Configure as RAID 1. When one hard disk crashes, you can still run on the mirrored hard disk.
2. Software Mirror - You can setup mirrors for your important folders, or even an entire drive, to another local/removable/network drive in real-time mirroring mode. Once you setup mirror(s) for a folder, mirroring will be done silently in the background without requiring any further effort or attention from you. When your hard disk crashes, you would need to replace the hard disk with new one and restore data from the mirrored source.