Welcome to 2015: A brand new year and a great time for a fresh start. Instead of shooting for nebulous, unrealistic goals in the New Year, start off 2015 with vows to improve your digital life. (You werent really going to go to the gym every day or be nicer to your siblings anyway.)

Most of the suggestions below arent hard to achieve and some are even the set-it-and-forget-it kinds of resolutions. But you, your PC, and your data will be much better off once youve hit these technological high points.

Conventional wisdom says you should have three copies of your data: the "original" on your PC, a backup at home, and a backup off-site.

You should already be backing up your PCs at home with an external hard drive, but what about the third backup? Its better to be safe than sorry if the worst befalls your home, like a robbery or fire.

The easiest way to get an off-site backup is to useonline backup services likeBackblaze, Carbonite, or CrashPlan. Were not talking about syncing-focused cloud storage solutions like Dropbox or OneDrive here. Pure online backup services generally dont offer sync (SpiderOak excluded) and are usually much cheaper than their cloud storage counterparts. Backblaze, the service I currently use, charges you $50 a year to back up one PC plus any connected drives.

Thats small price to pay for peace of mind about your family photos, music, videos, and documents. Consider choosing a service that gives you the option to encrypt your data without providing the service itself a copy of the key (your encryption password). It does take a little more responsibility, because if you forget your password youll need to upload your data to the cloud all over againthe backup service wont be able to descramble everything for you. But in this age of governmental snooping, it's better to keep your personal data as protected as possible.

This is obviously NOT one of the leaked Jennifer Lawrence pictures, because she's wearing clothes.

In late August, highly personal photos of celebrities such as Jennifer Lawrence and Kirsten Dunst surfaced online after falling into the hands of hackers who'd pilfered them from services such as iCloud. The hack was yet another reminder that you need to be careful about what you put online.

No, it's not fair to blame the victim in cases like these, but devastating hacks of personal data aren't going away anytime soon. So the best way to avoid any serious damage is to avoid putting anything online that you might regret being seen by others.

Dont forget that any photos you take with your phone may automatically be backed up to a cloud storage service depending on how youve configured your settingsthat how the actresses compromising pictures wound up on the Internet in the first place. The epic Sony Pictures hack can teach us a lot about protecting our email, including what not to say in digital messages. Finally, be sure to perform these five privacy fixes on Facebook pronto.

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8 easy digital resolutions for a happy, high-tech 2015