This past week I suffered a catastrophic blow. The external hard drive I was using to store all my travel photos and some additional personal/business documents, failed to start up and I fear that I may have lost all of the data on that disc. I feel sick about the whole situation!

But this isn’t the first time a hard drive has failed on me. In fact, I’ve had so many hard drives crash on me over the years, I really shouldn’t have made this kind of mistake.

The mistake I made was that the files on this one external hard drive were on this one disc… and this one disc alone. In otherwords, I hadn’t made copies of the files and backed them up in another location (like I should have).

I don’t think I need to go on and on about the importance of backing up your digital files. But this should serve as a reminder: If the data you are storing on your computer is important to you… back it up!

Store your data on two or more hard drives (in case one crashes, you’ll have the other)… keep your backups in different locations… and use an online backup service such as Carbonite or Mozy to automatically backup your important computer files.