Every single week I receive many messages from people who have
previously purchased a product, to say that their "hard drive
crashed" and lost everything, and could they receive their products
again.

Of course the answer is yes, but at the same time these people have
also permanently lost irreplaceable items such as digital
photographs of children growing up, vacations, birthdays and
Christmas etc, as well as software that cannot be replaced.

And much more of often irreplaceable value is lost forever as well.

The tragedy of this is that this trauma is completely avoidable.

I have been involved with technology and computers for 34 years
now, and I can tell you, without question, that sooner or later
your hard disk will crash, and all data will be lost - it is not a
case of  "if" - but only when. A Hard disk is one of a few
mechanical devices in your PC, the others being your CD/DVD/Blue
Ray drives and cooling fan on the power supply, all of which can
and do often fail.

Of course aside from the hard disk, many other situations may occur
that can cause you to lose your valuable data, for example power
surges, drops or outages.

Plain and simple everyone should backup your PC - at least once per
week, but ideally every single day.

These days there are various inexpensive options for effective
backups - here are just three of them:

1. USB Memory Stick. These devices are very inexpensive - between
$5 and $30 - depending on capacity.

These memory sticks simply plug in to a spare USB port and appear as
another drive volume - e.g. drive E:

All you need to do is copy your irreplaceable data to your memory
stick using Windows Explorer. Simply copy the entire folders
containing the data so you know which files belong where.

Here is a link to Amazon displaying suitable: USB Memory Sticks

2. External USB hard disk. These devices are literally hard disks,
just like the one in your PC, but sit in an enclosure next to your
screen. Like the USB Memory stick they plug in to a USB port and
appear as an additional drive volume with a drive letter.

Again - as with the memory stick - simply use Internet Explorer to
copy and paste all directories containing valuable days to the
external hard disk.

Additionally you can configure Windows backup to automatically back
up your data every day at a certain time. This data is stored in a
special format however, and can only be restored through Windows
backup.

External devices such as these are excellent options, and ones
which will not only hold all your valuable data, but will also make
it easy to transfer your data to a new PC.

3. DVD media. Almost Every PC these days has a writeable DVD drive.

All you need to do is purchase a package of writeable DVD disks from
your local supermarket, and then you can backup your folders
containing valuable data to these. Writeable DVD's only cost a few
dollars for a bulk pack.

So there is no excuse at all for experiencing the trauma of losing
your valuable, irreplaceable data due to a PC crash.