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Do you use your computer for anything important? Do you store digital pictures on your computer? How about music or movies? Do you use your computer for banking? Maybe for your own small business? If you answered yes to any of these questions I have another question for you – do you backup your computer on a regular basis? If not you should! Chances are that if you have been lucky enough never to have had a hard drive failure, a major system crash, a fire, a flood or an angry ex-wife – that one day your luck may run out.

I’ve been using a personal computer for a long time now and for many years I never really had much of a backup strategy. Over the years I have lost an important file or two because of it. I’ve had hard drive failures and system crashes that have required me to restore systems and resulted in me losing many files. While these losses were sometimes significant they were never catastrophic.

However something is different today than it was five or ten years ago – the amount of really important stuff on my computer has increased exponentially. Think back five or ten years – you probably still took most of your pictures with a film based camera, used a checkbook register to balance your checkbook, did your taxes on paper and your music collection was probably a stack of CDs on a rack by your TV. Maybe you still don’t use your computer to do all of these things, but someday you will and no better time than the present to start preparing.

I have a co-worker that lost a hard drive a few months back and lost his entire music collection. What is the value of a loss like that? In my case I have over 8,000 songs in my digital music library. If you value each song at .99 cents then you see that I have almost $8,000 worth of music on my hard drive. Truth be told a lot of what is on my hard drive is music I ripped off of my CD collection and I could recreate much of my collection, but that is a very time consuming process – and let’s face it time is money.

I don’t know about you – but I love my digital camera and I take a lot of pictures. The year my son was born I took over 15,000 pictures! A couple years ago I had a hard drive problem on my PC and lost a bunch of my honeymoon pictures (not a good thing). Anyway digital photos are something hard to put a value on, but if you are not backing up your digital images you will be sorry one day.

Anyway suffice to say I am a strong believer now (as a result of some tough lessons) in the importance of backing up your hard drive. Hopefully you are starting to realize that you might want to implement a backup strategy if you are not currently backing up your files. Next week I will talk a little about my backup strategy perhaps you can tell me what you do to backup your Mac.

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