I cannot say this enough. You MUST backup your data. Hard drives fail and they usually fail at inconvenient times. Like when you have a project due for work or school. Maybe you'll have a flood in your house. The bathroom upstairs could leak all over the computer downstairs. A power outage could cause a surge that fries your hard drive.
A plan:

1. Backup all your electronic devices daily. That means your PDA, Blackberry, and iPhone with all your contacts and calendar entries. These devices can plug into a computer and automatically back up or sync.

2. Backup data on your computer daily. Either invest in an external hard drive and backup software or an online backup service.  Some external hard drives plug into your router and will allow you to backup all the computers in your home.

Think about backing up on-site and off-site. An external hard drive is great but what if your house floods? Then you lose your computer AND your backup. That's why you need to consider off-site backup in addition to your on-site backup.

Great tools for the above solutions:

1. Off-site backup - www.carbonite.com. For $50/year, get unlimited storage space. Carbonite downloads software that runs quietly in the background that keeps your data backed up. Incredibly easy to use. The first backup can take awhile but after that, Carbonite just backs up changed data.

2. Genie-Soft Backup Sofware - use with an external hard drive for easy, complete backup of your data. You can pick and choose what to back up or let Genie Backup Manager suggest data to be saved.

3. My Book World Edition -Backup and storage for all the computers in your house.

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