Okay, I know we're here mainly to talk about financial issues, but due to a recent event, I'm reminded -- and feel a need to remind everyone I know -- of the importance of good backups.
There is a financial component -- one of the things that comes up frequently when talking to folks about their finances is records and record-keeping. While the topic of what to keep and for how long will be addressed another time, the point here is that nowadays, many of us keep more and more records on our computers. Banks and brokerages and credit card companies are trying especially hard to get us all to "go paperless" and use their online access to get our statements, for example. Many of them also let you not only view the statements online, but also download PDF copies of them. While these things are nowhere near as irreplaceable as, say, your family photos, it still would be unfortunate to lose them. Moreover, some folks keep detailed records in programs like Quicken which would be very painful to reconstruct if one's computer hard drive were lost.
So many of us now have digital cameras, too, and no longer have film or negatives at all. A hard drive crash could cost folks their only copies of some precious images.
So I'm saying it again - BACK UP YOUR COMPUTER HARD DRIVE!
There are many many ways to do this, from saving copies on CDs to fancy online services, but the fastest way I know is to keep an external hard drive and simply copy over to it all your important data. There are also great programs specifically for making backups which will carefully copy only things which have changed since the last backup, and there are programs which let you "clone" your computer's hard drive to a fully bootable backup. I highly recommend this last approach (perhaps in addition to others, like burning CDs with the family photos and storing those CDs in the safe or at another family member's house). Nevertheless, no matter how you choose to do it, I can't encourage you more strongly - do it - do it today - back up your computer hard drive!