Have you ever stopped to look at how many pictures, personal files or music you have stored on your computer? Computers today are built to hold vast amounts of data, whether it is pictures from your vacations, or schoolwork and study materials.

The problem is that if your computer were to crash, either by hardware failure or virus, all of your data could be lost…especially if you never backed it up. Almost everyone can relate to writing a document for schoolwork, only to lose it with no means of recovery available. In some cases, it could cost you a lot of money to recover data from a crashed hard drive.

The really great news is that it doesn’t cost a lot to backup it. All you need are some CD’s, maybe a DVD if your computer can write to it, or even an external USB-Hard Drive. By using one of these options, all you need to do is copy the contents of the directories to the location where the backup media is located. That’s it.

By copying the data to CD, DVD or external hard drive, you are guaranteeing that if you experience some sort of hardware issue, your data will be safe.

Likewise with USB Thumb Drives. Your thumb drive might contain information that would be difficult to replace if you don’t have a backup. A good rule of practice would be to create a backup every month. If that’s too much, then try every quarter. As long as you have some form of backup, you’ll be able to breathe a little easier if your computer goes down.