This post is rather timely for me because last week, while doing some debugging and testing, I inadvertently lost a lot of data. Because it caused me a lot of grief, it occurred to me that some good could come of it and that is where this post is coming from.

In this day and age, with technology being as pervasive as it is, it is easy to forget how much we rely on our PCs. If you are anything like me, you use your PC or Mac everyday for a wide variety of tasks, often taking for granted that everything will be there and it will work without incident.

Let me walk you through a scenario; you get up, get ready for the day and proceed to your office, with coffee or tea in hand. You turn on your PC or wake it up and staring at you instead of an expected log in screen is a message that says your hard disk has crashed.

After spending several hours trying to get the PC to boot, you are left with nothing. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the hard disk is toast, gone, kaput. Your only solution is to buy a replacement. That’s ok, you think, you’ve got all those pretty CDs from Microsoft or your other software vendors, you’ll be back up in running in a matter of minutes

And then … your stomach does a few turns because you realize that while you have all of the programs, you don’t have the data, the work, the important stuff.

You see it is rather easy to reinstall a program, but what about the documents, spreadsheets, files? Those are the things that cannot be reinstalled unless you have a good backup.

If you are like me, you have other important things on your PC, pictures or movies of your family. These are the really important things, because if they are gone, they cannot be recreated. Those usually represent a snapshot of time, when your child takes their first walk, a first Christmas or maybe a school play.

These memories are priceless and if you are like me, you probably haven’t backed them up. So, what I would like is for you to take some time, maybe a few hours, buy some blank CDs or DVD and backup all your important data; your files, pictures, movies and other important information, because if it goes away, it will be gone forever.

You should do this regularly but doing it at least once is critical! There is a lot of software on the Internet that can do regularly scheduled backups for you but even before any of that happens, please, please backup your stuff!