One-A-Day Gift Guide: Peace Of Mind

Backing up your computer has come a long way over the last few years, as least in terms of not making you want to kill yourself quite as painfully — hello Time Machine — but it’s still suuuuuuper annoying and lame. And I know your relatives don’t do it because you don’t do it and if you don’t do it clearly nobody else does it. Which is fine until the first time your computer or hard drive dies and you don’t have a backup, effectively erasing your entire life because anything that’s not on your computer basically never happened. Teeth are gnashed, clothes are torn and you are so very S O R R Y. You buy a backup drive and promise it’ll never happen again, until it does happen again because you keep forgetting to plug it into your computer.

Here’s the wonderful thing about this “cloud” everybody keeps talking about: You don’t have to plug your computer into a hard drive to back it up anymore. CrashPlan+ lets you back up an entire computer — and any hard drive that’s attached to it — on the internet. A one-year gift subscription runs $50, less than the cost of Netflix or Amazon Prime for a year.

It’s super easy. CrashPlan just runs in the background and automatically backs up the computer daily as new stuff gets added to it. If the worst of all possible fates befalls the computer, it’s no big deal. Everything’s on CrashPlan’s servers, waiting to be downloaded. Or, if that’s too annoying, CrashPlan will ship a hard drive out loaded up with all your data. It’ll be like nothing terrible ever happened in the history of the world. (To your computer.)

A fair warning: This is a long play gift. If you give this to somebody, inevitably they’ll be like, “This is the most boring gift anybody has ever given me, do you not like me or something, ‘cause why??????” Then their computer will die. It might take months, or even a couple of years. CrashPlan will save them. Then they’ll hug you very, very hard, maybe even the kind of hug that includes a mini-massage, because you gave them the best present ever.