Do me a favor, close your eyes and imaging your computer just died and you just lost everything on it, pictures, e-mails, documents. Now open them as the panic sets in. When was your last computer backup? Did you have your summer photos backed up? What if it wasn't a drive failure, would your backup survive a natural disaster, theft, or fire at your house? I see this all too often. It is a pointless loss because the solution is inexpensive and preventable. And, it's a heck of a lot cheaper than a $1,000+ data recovery, or worse yet, no option of data recovery. Rule #1 - Never have a single point of failure. Also known as, keep copies, lots of 'em! Step 1 - Make sure you backup your documents/photos locally. Burn CDs, DVDs, copy to another HD, do something, but make sure you keep up-to-date. Personally, I like the Western Digital or Seagate One touch external hard drives. Step 2 - Have an offsite disaster recovery plan. If you have high-speed internet, the best deal I have seen is at Mozy. If you don't click on links, type in www.mozy.com* in your favorite browser. They have a 2 Gb free account or for $5/month/computer unlimited storage for home users. Remember, for this, just backup your documents, photos, music, etc. Don't do your whole hard drive, programs that are backed up won't work if your try to restore them to a computer. The software can be configured to automatically backup when your computer is idle. However, there are no guaranties in the computer industry. Companies can come and go, so make sure step 1 is in place as well. Step 3 - Don't procrastinate. Drive failure can happen at any time, in the blink of an eye. *If you manually type in the url and sign up, please use the referral code 72UYE0. It connects to my 2 Gb free account, the only thing I get from the referral is that we will both get an additional 256 Mb of storage!