The AutoRecovery (or auto-save) feature in Microsoft Office is great for recovering documents when the program crashes, but if you want to be absolutely certain that backup has a home, Reddit user v12spd recommends changing the default location of those save files to your Dropbox (or other cloud storage) folder.

The idea makes sense. After all, the only time you really need AutoRecovery is when something goes bad. Microsoft Office has a really simple procedure for changing the location in all its programs and all you need to do is change that location to your file syncing service of choice. This is just as applicable to any program you use that automatically saves data. If you're working on a project that's incredibly important, this is a good way to add an extra layer of protection.

LPT: When writing anything crucial in Word, set your AutoRecover interval to 1 minute, and set the AutoRecover folder to one that syncs with Dropbox | Reddit

Today is World Backup Day, a holiday that celebrates the task we all know we should be doing, but one that's way too easy to ignore—until your hard drive starts to grind or your phone decides to go for a swim. Lucky for you, World Backup Day falls on a Saturday this year. You've got the time. Now let's back up that data.

We've covered backup from virtually every angle, and for every platform. Think of this post as the index for all your backup needs.

Priority One: Your Computer

First, let's start with the big one: Your computer.

Set Up an Automated, Bulletproof File Back Up Solution

Whether you're a Windows, Mac, or Linux user, here's our recommended method of backing up your computer. This post will help you back up your hard drive both locally (so you can quickly get back up and running if anything goes awry) and off-site (so that if your computer's stolen or your house burns down you can still get your data back).

If you want to beef up your on-site backups, you may also want to look into how to turn your old computer into a network-backup machine with FreeNAS.

Priority Two: Your Phone

Already got your computer backed up. Congrats, redundancy pro! You deserve a badge! Now let's turn to that other device with a hard drive you count on daily: Your phone. This section is divvied into iPhone and Android backup options.

First, for the iPhone crowd:

You already know that iTunes backs up your phone when you plug your iPhone into your computer and sync, so that's kind of a no-brainer. But if you really want to back up that iPhone and you don't mind jailbreaking, you've got an even better option:

How to Set Up a Fully Automated App and Settings Backup on Your Jailbroken iDevice

This guide will walk you through how to fully back up your iOS device's data, and do so wirelessly and automatically. Here's how it works.

Oh, and even if you decide you only want to back up your iOS device using the default iTunes route, you may want to keep two things in mind: First, make sure you back up that back up. If you're already backing up your computer (remember that backup method we linked to above?), then you're already on top of this. Second, you may want to consider encrypting your iPhone backups with iTunes. Doing so means you won't have to re-enter your passwords in the event you have to restore your device at a later date.

Now for the Android crowd:

How to Set Up a Fully Automated App and Settings Backup on Android

In an ideal world, your Android's apps, their settings, and your system settings would automatically back up to the cloud so that if you lost your phone, bought a new one, or installed a new custom ROM, setting up a fresh device with everything in place would be a piece of cake. That's not how it works by default, which is why we've detailed how to set up a fully automated app and settings backup on Android. Do it!

If you're backing up like a champ, it'll be exceptionally easy to upgrade to a new phone and take all your data with you. Good times.

Priority Three: Your Email

Most of us have had our email accounts for years, which means your inbox is more than just a tool you use to communicate daily; it's also a shoebox of digital memories. So back up those memories, already!

How to Back Up Your Gmail the Easy and Cheap Way

If your inbox suddenly went blank, where would you turn? This post walks through how to back up your Gmail the cheap and easy way, but many of the methods therein also apply to any email account, whether or not it's Google powered.

Priority Four: Back Up Your Webapps

How to Protect Your Data in the Event of a Webapp Shutdown (and Prevent the Problem in the Future)

In many ways, the web is a great place for your data. Most serious web companies follow a considerably more rigorous data backup and redundancy strategy than you do. That said, the world's not perfect. A service might shut down overnight, or one web site might not be taking backup as seriously as they should. Here's how to protect your data in the event of a webapp shutdown or other data loss. Basically how to back up that business.

Priority Five: Games and Media

If you've already got your most important data backed up, you may want to turn to less mission-critical forms of data—for example, your video games and media.

For starters, let's take a look at all those Blu-Rays:

The Hassle-Free Guide to Ripping Your Blu-Ray Collection

Blu-Ray may be majestic, but it also has more copy protection than any other format around, and playing it on your computer can be difficult to impossible. Here's how to rip and back them up.

How to Rip a DVD to Your Computer

If you'd simply like to get rid of your old-school DVDs, hit up our step-by-step guide to ripping a DVD to your computer.

Lastly, let's back up those video games. Unfortunately it's not as easy to back up your games in a playable fashion across consoles, but we have covered some great options for Nintendo lovers.

How to Back Up and Play Your Wii Games from an External Hard Drive

First, our guide to backing up and playing Wii games from an external hard drive lets you keep expensive discs out of harms way, decrease game load times, and organize your collection with swanky cover art.

How to Hack Your Nintendo DS for Easy Backups and Single-Cartridge Playback

Finally, you can also hack your Nintendo DS for easy backups, and even play a handful of great games from one simple cartridge.

Got a backup strategy you swear by? Did we miss some important piece of data? Let's hear about it in the comments.

We're all decluttering our closets and basements in celebration of spring, but it's time for a break. Kick back on the couch, pull up your Android phone, and act like you're still being productive by giving it some spring cleaning of its own.

Reclaim Drive and SD Card Space

Most Android devices have two different storage spaces: your internal space (where apps are stored) and your SD card (where your music, photos, and many of your apps' settings are stored). The SD card is easy to clean up—just delete any music, photos, and videos you don't need. If you see any folders that look like settings for apps you've removed, you can delete those too. If you're rooted (which is really easy to do), you can even use an app like previously mentioned SD Maid to clean up all that cruft for you.

Cleaning up your internal storage is also pretty simple: just uninstall unnecessary apps. Chances are you have a few apps you don't use anymore, not to mention games you don't play—they'll take up the most space—and you can just uninstall them from the Play Store to free up that space and, hopefully, speed up your phone a little bit. If your phone is starved for internal storage and you can't spare any of your hard-earned apps, you can try moving them to your SD card instead. This will free up that internal space and speed up your phone, but keep all your apps close at hand. To do this, just head to Settings > Applications > Manage Applications. Select an app, and tap the "Move to SD Card" button to move it. Some apps won't have this ability, but you should find that lots of your space-hogging apps have no problem living on your SD card. You can read more about this process here.

Give It a Battery Boost

Android phones in particular are notorious for sucking the life out of your battery. If you haven't dug through your settings in awhile, this is a good time to make sure you're getting the most out of your battery as possible. This means turning the brightness down, the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth off when not in use, and turning off any eye candy (not to mention uninstalling apps that constantly use up your data). Tweak these settings yourself or automate them with a program like Tasker or JuiceDefender for an easy, hassle-free battery life boost. I'm always an advocate of getting a second battery, too—just keep it in your glove box or in your desk drawer for those emergencies where your phone is about to die.

Speed It Up with Some Settings Tweaks

If your phone is a bit older, or it's just feeling sluggish, there are a number of things you can do to make it feel a little smoother. Trying a new home screen launcher is always good for a bit of speed, as is lowering your number of home screens and ditching all those widgets. If you're rooted, you can even overclock or install a custom ROM for even more speed. And, if you really want to get technical, there are some advanced settings you can play with to eke every bit of speed out of your phone possible. Just don't use a Task Killer, whatever you do (unless you're on a really, really old version of Android—like, 1.6 old). For more info on how to speed up your phone, check out our in-depth guide.

Remove and Clean Your Case (If You Use One)

Of course, the inside of your phone isn't the only thing that needs cleaning. If your phone has gotten a bit dirty over the past year—which is even more likely if you have a dirt-trapping case on it—you might want to take it off and clean it up. The case shouldn't be too hard to clean, but make sure you don't clean your phone with anything that'll harm the screen. We've gone through how to safely clean and disinfect your gadgets before, so check out that guide for more info.

Unfortunately, Android devices are finicky, and can take a lot of maintenance to work well—especially the older ones. Be sure to check out our more in-depth guides above, and you should be able to get your phone running as optimally as possible. Got any maintenance tips we left out? Share them with us in the comments below.

With the sun shining and bees buzzing in celebration of spring you've likely started decluttering your closets and basements. If you need a break from all that indoor work, it might be time to step away and do the same for your iPhone. Here are some easy tips to give your trusted iPhone a spring cleaning of its own.

Reclaim Hard Drive Space

Generally, cleaning up your iPhone (or iPod Touch, or iPad) is a pretty straight-forward process where you check and tinker with your hard drive consumption. We haven't seen a hard statistic for how much space it's good to keep free on your iPhone, but as a general rule, it's good to leave at least 500 MB-1GB of free space when you can. This frees up enough room for apps to store data so you don't have to worry about crashes.

If you're running short on data storage on your iPhone, it's time to clean up and take a look at which apps are taking up the most space and why. On your phone, tap Settings > General > Usage. Here you'll find a list of your apps and how much space they're taking up.

In the screenshot on the right you can see that the Camera+ app is taking up 273 MB of storage. Why? It has its own built-in camera roll. This means the app is storing a second set of photos on top of the default photo app. Tap through each of your apps that are taking up a lot of space and you'll likely find a few more offending apps. Twitter, for instance, is a 13.5 MB app, but somehow manages to take up 383 MB of documents and data.

The solution? For apps like cameras you can go into the app itself and delete all the extra pictures. However, for Twitter your only option is to delete and reinstall the app. Once you do, the usage will drop to around 10 MB and start climbing up again over time.

Overhaul the Settings on Your iPhone

If your iPhone is struggling with battery life the easiest fixes are available in your Settings menu. We've gone through a the biggest offenders on your iPhone's battery life before and disabling the following settings can increase your battery life significantly:

• Push notifications for email (Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars).
• Push notifications for apps (Settings > Notifications).
• Location Services (Settings > Location Services).
• Disable Ping (Settings > General >Restrictions > Ping).

You can enable and disable most of the above settings on a per-app basis, so if you like having one or two apps sending you notifications you can keep them, but you don't need notifications for everything.

Overhaul Your Settings in iTunes

It's a good idea to take a look back at your iTunes syncing settings when you're cleaning up your phone. This is especially the case if you've started using alternatives to the default apps. For instance, if you've picked up our favorite podcast manager for iPhone, Downcast, you don't need to continue syncing the podcasts you download in iTunes at the same time.

The same goes for calendars, email, contacts, and the rest of the default apps. Uncheck any boxes that don't apply to you to help speed up the syncing process. For instance, if you don't use the default calendar you have no reason to sync it every time you plug in your phone. The same goes for Safari bookmarks, contacts, and mail.

Uninstall Unnecessary Apps

A lot of iPhone users are a bit addicted to apps. We've gone over a few ways to clean up your app usage by creating a most used page and a second holding bin page to test new apps. If you're the type to download and try tons of apps on a daily basis it's probably necessary to clean up your home screen and take a close look at all the apps you didn't end up liking. Delete them and free up hard drive space and declutter your home screen in one simple step.

Remove and Clean Your Case (If You Use One)

We've shown you how to clean and disinfect your gadgets before and if you're busy optimizing the insides of your iPhone, you might as well clean up the outside too. This is especially important if you use a case because over time dust and dirt get trapped in-between the case and iPhone. The dust can end up scratching the back of your iPhone if you're not careful. If you have a rubber case you can clean it with a solution of water and Windex.

In general iPhones don't need a lot of maintenance, but hard drives fill up quickly and that's the biggest cause of problems further down the line. As always, when you're cleaning everything above don't forget that a good old hard reset (hold home button and power button until it restarts) can do wonders for your iPhone's speed. Have any spring cleaning tips we left out? Share them with us in the comments.