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It's inevitable. Everyone faces hard drive failure at least once in their life. Whether its a stolen computer, a natural disaster, or simply a faulty drive, everyone will live this nightmare in real life. So what are the options for keeping your precious data in a safe place?

There are so many options for keeping your data safe because hard drive failure is such a common and life-shattering event. Options range from localized to off-site back-up solutions. Every option ranges in cost, the amount of control you have to recover data, and the convenience factor of the recovery and backup processes.

If you don't feel like throwing down cash on hardware, you can go the off-site backup route. The obvious benefit to online backup is not needing to pay for a device to store your data. Also, even if you do have your own device it is still not immune to failure and disasters. Online backup companies own ultra-secure servers with enormous amounts of available space to store your precious data. The drawbacks include having to download a program and/or run your system's resources in order to continually backup your data, the need to have constant internet access, trusting your data to a third party, and a monthly payment. Some of the big players in the online backup community include Carbonite, X-Drive, Box.net, Mozy, Connected.com, Novastor, and I-Backup.

The other option you could go with is local backup, or in other words, your own hardware. There is a big variety of hard drives you can buy and some are even designed exclusively for backing up your data conveniently. If you are in the market for a low cost solution that allows you to backup data instantly, look for the drives with a physical button on the enclosure that will back up your entire hard drive or specified sections. These are relatively inexpensive depending on the amount of space you need, but the main drawback is that these, like all hard drives, are fallible. If this drive dies, you're in trouble.

There are more higher-end back up solutions that uses a technology called RAID (Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks). These systems use two or more drives that mirror the data you are backing up. In other words, every time you drag and drop a file onto this external storage system, it writes an exact copy of both files onto two seperate drives. This way, if one hard drive fails, you know you'll always have a healthy drive with all of your precious data. One popular RAID module is the Buffalo DriveStation Duo, providing two SATA drives for space in the 1.5 terabyte neighborhood (that's around 1500 gigs).

Backing up data that is worth more than the hardware that is storing it will help avoid catastrophes that can end up in costly data recovery services, or even unrecoverable losses.