Shanta Hasan asked me for advice about traveling internationally with a laptop.

Dell said Friday it has purchased backup software vendor AppAssure, in the first of an expected run of acquisitions following Dell's appointment of former CA CEO John Swainson as head of a new software division.

A computer is only as useful as the software you run on it, so you should keep your PC's software current--and not necessarily with the latest version of a program that's getting long in the tooth. Sometimes, switching to a new application can help you speed up your work or make your system more efficient.

APP OF THE DAY: Backup (OTA Data Backup Restore)

If your business isn't leveraging Cloud technology as part of its daily operations yet, there's a good chance that it will be within the next few years. According to Cisco, the global Internet traffic generated by the use of cloud computing services will increase 12-fold by 2015.

Altaro Software has started shipping Hyper-V Backup, a product designed to make it easier for small and medium-size companies to protect the data on their virtual servers.

Hard drive crashes are a nightmare for computer users for many reasons. Not only can data held dear to one's heart be lost, but trying to recover it can cost an arm and a leg, if not more. Hard drive maker Seagate attempts to address both those problems with the release today of its GoFlex Turbo drive with SafetyNet data recovery services.

Do you back up your data? Nearly half of small businesses have learned the hard way why regular data backups are crucial, yet many still fail to backup critical data, or they cut corners to save a buck and find out it can be much more expensive to be cheap.

No single cloud service can do everything. Some shine when it comes to streaming a cloud music collection from the Web, but stink at syncing desktop folders. Other cloud services are great for sharing photos, but useless for reviewing a document's revision history.

Lock down your PC.

Many of us were shocked last week that a company as prominent as Danger, Inc. could make such a rookie mistake by losing the data of T-Mobile's Sidekick customers. As a system administrator, if there is one thing you absolutely have to get right, it's backups. Here are six ways to botch them.

Mention Shakespeare and everyone spouts "To be or not to be." Mention backup, and the question becomes, "To tape or not to tape?" Is tape dead, or do tape-based backup systems still have a place in the modern small business?