It doesn’t matter whether you are a IT support professional or a home computer user. The most important thing you can do for your peace of mind is backup your data!
Unless you have money to burn (at this time), your data is probably stored on a hard drive. That is a mechanical device so it is subject to breaking down. If your hard drive experiences a catastrophic failure, you could lose all of the data on the drive in the blink of an eye.
So make a backup of your data! There are lots of ways to backup you data. Some are: a) setup a mirror drive, b) backup to an external drive, c) copy your data to a USB thumb drive, a CD or DVD, and d) backup your data “onto the cloud” (I.e. onto the Internet).
The point is, backup your data on a routine basis. You don’t want to lose your family pictures, your tax data, your only copy of the Great American Novel, or whatever else you have on your computer. Make your data safe via backups and you can sleep peacefully at night even if/when your hard drive dies.
