"There are two types of people. Those who have lost data, and those who will."

"There are two types of people. Those who have lost data, and those who will."

If you have an unexpected power-surge, it will fry and fuse the electrics on the motherboard. You can still retrieve your data, but it will be very expensive."

Keeping your backup separate from your machine is much more sensible. Your average home DVD-writer can now store almost 5GB on a single disc. If you need more space then tapes, external hard drives and shareware which chops up large files into manageable chunks are all there to help. If you want to be even more secure, you can pay for your data to be taken off-site entirely. It's called online backup, and you send your data across the net to a remote site - leaving it safe until you might need it.

"If you back up your entire hard disc, it will take up a huge amount of space. It's much more efficient to just back up your work - not all your applications and your system. Presumably you would still know where all your installers were for your software and opertaing system, so you can go back to them to replace them."

Try configuring each of your pieces of software to save your work in one umbrella folder - it's exactly what Windows' 'My Documents' folder was made for. In fact, you don't even need to backup all your work every time.

Taking regular full backups won't generally be necessary, since most of your files won't change much during their lifetime. An incremental backup takes one full copy of the filing system, and then only records the changes that you make.

Because of this, subsequent backups run a lot quicker. You'll find most backup programs have this incremental option. With storage becoming ever cheaper, backing up is becoming easier. Choose what's best for you and get into a routine.http://www.bbcworld.com/