Technology is getting more and more complex, but at the same time, amazing technological benefits are available to us average Joes without too much fiddling around. That is what this column will be covering. Once a week every Monday, right here at BloggingStocks.com, I'll feature an easy-to-use hack, gadget, or service that really can make your life better. Geeks, technophiles and early adopters have plenty of other places to look for hot new technologies to try. Here you'll find technology for the rest of us.

Going through the ritual of backing up is like taking cod liver oil. We know we should get our Omega 3 fatty acids and healthy oils. We know we should back up our data. But it's annoying and cumbersome and easy to forget to do. What you need to do is find an easy, or automated solution. Even better: Find a solution that offers advantages compelling enough to make you want to use it.

Years ago when I first got bitten by the writing bug, I sat down to learn how to touch type and then proceeded to write thousands of words a week to hone my craft. I was tapping furiously away on a Tandy computer, one of the last ones still made under that brand. I had purchased it several years earlier with all my hard-gained summer earnings as a high school student. I had a general suspicion that it was getting too old, so I purchased a laptop and had started the process of moving over my early literary output when, with apocryphally perfect timing, the Tandy just melted down.

As someone who now makes his living as a writer, an incident like this would be disastrous. I learned my lesson. Everyone has their own seminal data-loss story to recount. And yet many business owners I talk to don't have solid data backup strategies. Including people who've been through the pain of data loss. Hard drive failure is as inevitable as death or taxes, people usually only dodge it by upgrading computers so often, but hard drives can fail sooner, so the sooner you start thinking about protecting your data the better.